Key points
- Ukrainian artist Maria Kulikivska will present her project “Bullets of Flowers” at Malta Biennale’26.
- The exhibition combines sculpture, textiles and sound, transforming the space into a territory of artistic and emotional resistance.
- The project explores bodily memory, trauma and recovery, transforming objects of violence into artistic forms.
- The exhibition includes installations of mutilated sculptures and a ten-metre canvas exploring the theme of home and inner rupture.
- The exhibition will run from 11 March to 29 May 2026 at the Birgu Old Armoury, Malta.
The “Bullets of Flowers” project by Ukrainian artist, architect and researcher Maria Kulikivska will be one of the thematic pavilions of the Malta Biennale, supported by Roza Topanova.
The exhibition will combine sculpture, textiles and sound. The main idea of the project is to transform objects of violence and explore bodily memory.
The artist takes casts of spent bullet casings and casts phantom copies from transparent resin together with healing herbs and flowers, knowledge of which she inherited from her grandmother.
The exhibition also aims to rethink female physicality. Alongside a new work from the series Unfinished Mother, there is an installation entitled My Body Is a Battlefield, consisting of mutilated sculptures of pregnant women, which were deliberately destroyed by an unknown person during the exhibition in Copenhagen.
Now these sculptures have become evidence of the impossibility of completely destroying memory and life, showing that even in trauma and vulnerability, people remain capable of resistance.
The ten-metre canvas made of stitched leather, “Perhaps there will still be a home there…” recreates Kulikivska’s engraved conversations with her beloved, capturing the inner rupture and the impossibility of recreating the feeling of home and a new Ukraine.
The project’s multi-layered soundscape combines recordings of the architect’s body sounds, her voice and whispers of healing recipes from her grandmother, music by Valentin Silvestrov and piano playing by Yevgen Gromov.
Participation in the Malta Biennale Thematic Pavilion, held under the patronage of UNESCO, allows Ukraine to showcase its unique knowledge of preserving life and culture in conditions of destruction and its capacity for recovery.
The exhibition will run from 11 March to 29 May 2026 in the Thematic Pavilion in the historic Birgu Old Armoury building in Malta.
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