Borderland exhibition explores war and exile at Vienna museum

Ukrainian artist Kateryna Lysovenko explores war, exile and life between two countries in Borderland, a new exhibition at Vienna’s Museum of Applied Arts, ORF reports. The exhibition runs from September 16 to October 18.

Visitors enter an immersive space in the museum’s Forum, filled with vivid paintings in shades of red and pink, including figures with visible organs and hybrid bodies. On the stairs leading to the works, Lysovenko has placed a female figure in a thinking pose, with pink spikes growing from her spine.

One side of the exhibition addresses fascism through relatively subtle watercolours and more powerful oil paintings. In Silent Hour, created in 2025, people wrapped in sleeping bags lie like mummies in a threateningly glowing forest. Her 2024 painting Your Home Has Come to You shows a female figure resembling a lump of flesh sitting at a table as the room around her dissolves into troubling clouds and smoke.

The brighter, more relaxed side presents newer works made specifically for the exhibition. They show Kyiv on the Dnipro and what the exhibition describes as beautiful Vienna on the Danube. Both rivers flow into the Black Sea, which appears in another painting in green, blue and red tones near Odesa. According to the exhibition text, the rivers represent migration and the upheaval of political systems.

A central work is a portrait of Lysovenko’s family, which was torn apart by the war, curator Bärbel Vischer said. Painted family members in blue, yellow, pink and orange offer glimpses into their inner lives. The work is hung between the two sections of the exhibition, serving as a bridge between the two worlds.

Lysovenko fled Ukraine for Austria in 2022 and is now building a new life in Vienna, while most of her family remains in Ukraine. She said she feels fully at home nowhere and is troubled by guilt and questions about what she is allowed to do. Her art helps her process the situation. In Vienna, she has also drawn inspiration from artists including Oskar Kokoschka and Maria Lassnig.

The exhibition follows Lysovenko’s receipt of the Münze Österreich Prize at viennacontemporary 2025. MAK Director-General Lilli Hollein called her one of the most important painters of her generation and said her work was a strong fit for the museum, despite painting not usually being its primary focus.

Hollein said visitor numbers for the exhibition remained strong. Visitors must pass through a metal detector and leave large bags or backpacks at the entrance.