Dana Kavelina
Dana Kavelina (born 1995 in Melitopol; lives in Berlin and Lviv) primarily works with animation and video as well as installation, painting and graphics. She graduated from the Graphics Department of the National Technical University of Ukraine. Her work often explores military violence and war in relation to the position of the victim as a political subject as well as the distance between historical and individual trauma, memory and misrepresentation. Her 2020 film “Letter to a Turtledove” was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York and included in the exhibition “Signals: How Video Transformed the World”. Kavelina’s works were presented at, amongst others, the Kyiv Biennial, the 60th Venice Biennial, the M HKA Antwerp and the festival steirischer herbst 2022 and 2023. She is the winner of the main prize of the 7th edition of the PinchukArtCentre Prize, shortlisted for the Future Generation Art Prize 2024.
GREY EARTH
IN COLLABORATION WITH ANNA NYKYTIUK AND MYKHAILO CHELNOKOV
2026
Video, stop-motion animation
21 min
Courtesy the artist
This stop-motion animation film by Dana Kavelina (b. 1995, Melitopol) intertwines war, extraction, and ecological exhaustion through the parallel journeys of two figures: a soldier positioned on the front line and a cow taken from an industrial dairy farm. Following an explosion, both characters experience a moment of suspended freedom – the cow breaks free from the truck transporting her toward slaughter, while the wounded soldier is straying through a grey zone, abandoned by his unit.
Alongside these figures, the soil emerges as a central presence: not as inert ground, but as a living entity that holds memory, violence, and continuity. Exhausted by both warfare and industrial agriculture, its depiction resembles a hollow earth – a territory stripped of its substance, where soil becomes an empty resource rather than a living ground. The film thus also seeks moments of connection, suggesting the earth as an active force capable of resistance, a material witness that bears the marks of repeated destruction.
Through its handmade animation, the film proposes restoring the organic world with artificial materials, recreating in miniature the work of nature and destruction, compressing cycles of life, war, and extraction. In her animated videos, installations, paintings, and graphics, Kavelina addresses military violence, the distance between historical and personal trauma, memory and misrepresentation.
Dana Kavelina participated in the Kyiv Biennial 2025 – Near East Far West (03.10.25–08 .01.26) at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw and in the Kyiv Biennial 2025 – Hollow Earth (11.11.–05.12.25) at Kunstraum Memphis in Linz.
Commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, the Visual Culture Research Center, and RIBBON International for the Kyiv Biennial 2025.
Co-produced with steirischer herbst ’25.
Supported by the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program, funded by the Federal Foreign Office (AA).
