The Unfolding Landscapes show, which includes paintings, sculptures, installations, drawings, photographs and videos, could not return to Ukraine and was in danger of being locked up after its run in Denmark ended. A solution was reached during four weeks of frantic negotiations between curators, officials from the EU’s foreign policy wing, the European External Action Service and the Museum of Art and History in Brussels. Created and curated by 42 Ukrainian artists before Vladimir Putin’s invasion in February, the show features works that give a sense of foreboding. It will now remain at the Belgian capital’s leading art museum until September 18, after which there are tentative plans to move it to Switzerland. EU officials are considering circulating the exhibition in some of the 27 member states until the pieces are safely returned home, in what officials and curators said would be a highly symbolic moment. At the opening of the exhibition on Tuesday, Ukraine’s ambassador to the EU, Vsevolod Chentsov, said that by adopting the exhibition the EU had “brought this new spirit of quick and effective decisions to the art world”, in a nod to the rapid enforcement of the economic the bloc sanctions Russia. “I hope this project has a great European future,” he said. “It starts in Belgium, in Brussels, in the heart of the EU, and I know there are ideas about how it can continue and I hope, I’m sure, that we can do it.” Mysterious World, 1985 (C-Type paper collage print), by Sergei Sviatchenko. Many of the artists whose works are on display are involved in Ukraine’s war effort in cities such as Kharkiv near the front lines in the country’s northeast, according to curator Natalia Matsenko, who traveled from Kyiv for the Belgian opening. “I don’t know if any of the artists are fighting, but I know some have the intention of doing so,” he said. “This is a war and the whole nation is involved. The army is not there, but the whole country is volunteering now.” Ukrainian-Danish artist Sergei Sviatchenko, a famous part of the Ukrainian new wave art movement that emerged at the time of the collapse of the USSR, was a key figure in organizing the original exhibition at the Silkeborg Bad Art Center in Denmark. which lasted until May. Sviatchenko, 70, said that when it became clear that the original plan to return the works to Kyiv was not practical, he had the idea that he could travel across Europe as a continuation of what he described as his life’s work as “cultural diplomacy”. “Maybe he can go to London too. That would be special, I think,” Sviatchenko said. Subscribe to First Edition, our free daily newsletter – every morning at 7am. BST Most of the artists featured are of a younger generation, born since the early 1980s as citizens of the USSR, who were teenagers when Ukraine became an independent country in 1991. The exhibition brochure said they had first-hand experience of the 2014 Revolution of Dignity, which condemned totalitarian communist and Nazi regimes and began the decommunism of modern Ukraine. The 2014 revolution brought the ouster of then pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych. A video in the show of Yuri Yefanov, an artist born in Zaporizhzhia near today’s front line, was filmed in 2013 on a beach on the southern coast of Crimea, where the artist grew up. Its centerpiece is a concrete cube that was once part of the coastal defenses. Today the area is impossible to visit as it is the site of a Russian military academy. Russia invaded and occupied Crimea in 2014.
