"If only, you know, there was still some kind of land left. Otherwise, before returning, they will just completely dismantle this country for mineral resources, for minerals, you know, for all this resource. You'll have the land, but there'll be no soil, no minerals, nothing. Everything is dead..."
— Private Mineral, Grey Earth.

In this exhibition, the artists confront the new visual and physical landscape of war. They navigate a reality in which the human body and its habitat exist in a state of profound fragility. The works operate at the perceptive intersection of warfare, technology, and the organic world. Titled Hollow Earth, the exhibition draws its central anxiety from a film by Dana Kavelina: the fear that the land itself will be utterly dismantled, leaving only "dead" earth stripped of soil, minerals, and life.

For an agrarian country on the frontline, the landscape takes on a special meaning — it becomes a stage on which the traditional "circle of life" accelerates to an enormous, distorting pace. The landscape, full of bodies hybridizes on the verge between life and death. What was once solid and clear now shakes and oscillates. Certainty exists as an overstretched string. Form is questioned — war deforms both the material and the immaterial. It also affects memory and perception. Like an object with a powerful gravitational pull, war can warp time and space.

An individual’s experience of survival warps the environment into a psychological mirror. In Anatoly Belov’s Psychedelic Forest, this internal struggle for adaptation is portrayed. The forest appears mysterious and apocalyptic, with trees that resemble human forms, their branches looking like limbs or mutating muscles. These trees embody human fears, hopes, and sufferings. In this unique landscape, the natural world becomes a hybrid entity — perhaps a predator, perhaps a defender — reflecting the human condition in a world where survival is a constant negotiation.

Lada Nakonechna’s Studium des Menschen (Study of Man) addresses the deformation and dehumanization of the body. Connecting tubes of black steel with fragile, papier-mâché knee molds, the objects move away from a coherent body to become fragments. The pieces reference ancient statues and the relics of buildings or monuments, highlighting the fragility of both human life and social habitats when faced with destruction. This leads to a state in which bodies and relics coexist, where flesh and metal are bound together.

This fragmentation is reflected in the visually distorted landscape. In Retroville, Victoria Pidust merges generated image worlds with photography. Using photogrammetry, she renders "natural" landscapes from the shattered screen of a war-damaged shopping mall in Kyiv, creating a hybrid visual material. This work registers not only the physical damage, but also demonstrates our perception's readiness to be manipulated by a fragmented, manufactured reality.

The conflict reveals an ethical challenge posed by technological advancement. In Vova Vorotniov’s Drones, the artist examines the ambiguous position of modern warfare technology. Reduced to stripped-down visual diagrams, the drones highlight the unsettling accessibility and pervasiveness of these machines, which can survey and strike, and protect and destroy. The series questions whether technological progress should be measured by efficiency or the destructive purposes to which it is applied.

This destruction culminates in the crisis of the soil, explored in Dana Kavelina’s stop-motion animation, Grey Earth. The film follows a soldier and a cow who gain a sense of freedom after explosions. A third character is the soil itself. Exhausted by war and industrial agriculture, the soil is presented as a living entity that fights back. This materially produced animation models this organic world with artificial materials, reflecting the work of nature and destruction in miniature. The fear of total depletion brings the prophecy of Hollow Earth — a war for land with no "guts," its contents stolen for resources.

The exhibition is a collaboration between Memphis, Kyiv Biennial, and tranzit​.at. Funded by the Federal Ministry for Housing, Art, Culture, Media and Sport, ERSTE Foundation, Direktion Kultur des Landes Oberösterreich, Kultur und Bildung, Linz Kultur Förderungen.