Artistic Biography

As an artist, Svitlana Biedarieva focuses on art and war, postcolonial space, violence, and resistance. She works in the artistic media of digital graphics, painting, and installation. In 2017, her project of large-scale digital murals, The Morphology of War, was presented as two solo shows at the Museo Erasto Cortés in Puebla, Mexico, and at the National Centre of Arts in Mexico City. This project was also shown at the 5th International Biennial of Odesa in Ukraine (2018), Alternative Biennial of Havana (2018), National Museum of Cultures in Mexico City (2019), London School of Economics and Political Science in London (2023), Estonian Museum of Contemporary Art in Tallinn (2023), and East Hawaii Cultural Center in Hilo (2023), among others. It was featured as a contribution to Daedalus. Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, Vol. 152, Issue 2 (MIT Press). Her latest project of digital muralsThe Dam (2024-2025), focuses on the cultural and social effects of ecocide in Ukraine following the explosion of the Kakhovka Dam in southern Ukraine by Russia. Her painting series Aftermaths (2021-ongoing) focuses on the ambiguities and uncertainties produced by the war, and explores the questions of violence and the erasure of knowledge through the lens of art history. This project was featured in the bookTerra Invicta: Ukrainian Wartime Reimaginings for a Habitable Earth, edited by Adrian Ivakhiv, published in 2025

Biedarieva has presented her work in Mexico, Ukraine, Estonia, Finland, Cuba, Germany, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Her selected group exhibitions include Art/Work: 55 Ukrainian and Polish Artists (Mystetskyi Arsenal in Kyiv and City Gallery in Wroclaw, Poland, 2017), The Classical Now! (2018) at the Bush House in London, organized by Kings College London and the Musée d’Art Classique de Mougins, At the Front Line: Ukrainian Art, 2013-2019 (2019) at the National Museum of Cultures in Mexico City, and the exhibition MUHi Ukrainian Artists Award (2019), the Taras Shevchenko National Museum in Kyiv, organized by the Shcherbenko Art Centre, for which she received the Audience Choice Award. She was the laureate of the Prince Claus Seed Award. She also received grants and fellowships from the European Cultural Foundation, the British Council UK, the Mexican Ministry of Culture (FONCA), and the Glyndebourne Festival.