“Bullets of Flowers”: Maria Kulikovska to Represent Ukraine at Malta Biennale 2026

Marianna Dzhulay
2 days ago
2 min read

Valletta, Malta — Ukrainian artist, architect, and researcher Maria Kulikovska announces her project “Bullets of Flowers,” which will be presented as part of the Thematic Pavilion of the Malta Biennale. Bringing together sculpture, textile, and sound, the exhibition transforms the display space into a site of artistic and emotional resistance, where vulnerability becomes an instrument of healing.

The central idea of the project is grounded in the transformation of objects of violence and in processing physical destruction through an exploration of bodily memory. The flowers in this pavilion returned with a renewed power: they heal. The petals inside the bullets indicate traditional healing methods interchanging their original purpose: to kill. A key component of the exhibition is also the rethinking of female corporeality: alongside new works from the “Pregnant” series, fragments of semi-transparent sculptures that were intentionally destroyed by unknown individuals. A symbol that actually is not a symbol anymore as they were vandalized in a public space in the in Danmark. The artist hesitantly incorporated this added vandalism into the work with the idea to expose her exposure to a world that predominately fails to protect its values.

The ten-metre skin canvas “Perhaps There Will Still Be a Home…” serves as a manifesto on the impossibility of substituting home as a component of identity. Inscribed on its surface are conversations between the artist and her beloved: reflections on the realization that one may purchase new walls and a roof, yet cannot acquire the feeling of home — nor a new Ukraine. The work registers a state of internal rupture that no other place in the world can resolve.

The project’s multilayered sonic landscape combines recordings of the artist’s bodily sounds, her voice, and whispered healing recipes passed down by her grandmother with the final composition by Valentyn Sylvestrov and the performance of the distinguished pianist Yevhen Hromov. Together they create a space of shared experience and restoration.

Participation in the Thematic Pavilion of the Malta Biennale (under the patronage of UNESCO) allows the project to enter into a global dialogue. Here, Ukraine resonates as a subject possessing unique knowledge of how to preserve life and culture at the epicentre of destruction, and how to retain the strength to heal oneself and others nearby.

Maria Kulikovska (b. 1988, Kerch, Autonomous Republic of Crimea) is an architect, PhD researcher, and co-founder of Garage33 Gallery-Shelter in Kyiv. Her practice investigates corporeality as an architecture of spatial resistance. Twice displaced, she draws on her personal history to construct a universal language of vulnerability and responsibility.

The pavilion is realised with the support of Roza Tapanova and UKR ARTA NGO

Production and Organisation: Garage33 Gallery-Shelter (Kyiv)

Dates: 11 March – 29 May 2026

Location: Thematic Pavilion, Malta

Project Team:

Artist: Maria Kulikovska

Commissioner: Mariana Dzhulai / Block A gallery

Curator: Eszter Csillag

Founder of Garage33, Produser: Oleh Vinnichenko

Designer, Identity Author: Olha Kuzovkina

Production Engineer: Fadey Tatarchuk

Communication Manager, Coordinator: Natalia Riabkina