Kostiantyn Zorkin is a Kharkiv-based artist working with performance, installation, graphic art, puppet theatre, and land art. He is a cultural studies specialist by education and a former lecturer with 15 years of experience.
On Nimecky V'їzd (German Drive), once called Pushkinskyi, a quiet basement studio hides beneath a residential building. Kostiantyn Zorkin has been working here for about a decade.
The air is heavy with the scent of cigarette smoke and wood. Wood shavings scatter across the floor. Zorkin's ink drawings, created in a distinctive authorial technique, hang on the walls. The space is a perfect kind of chaos, filled with wooden and metal sculptures. Near his workbench stands a shelf lined with carving tools—"the best in Ukraine," the artist notes.
In this interview, we talk with Kostiantyn Zorkin about Imenem Mista [In the Name of the City]—an exhibition exploring the metaphysical identity of Kharkiv, Zorkin's graphic novel, the avant-garde, and "strong" art.
IMENEM MISTA, A SHY KHARKIV, AND A GRAPHIC NOVEL
Imenem Mista is a cross-disciplinary project that weaves together visual art, architecture, literature, film, performance, and more. It all started with an interactive exhibition at the Kharkiv Literary Museum on May 18, 2024. Over time, the project began to grow—eventually spilling out into the streets of Kharkiv in the form of thirteen concrete installations, each one a kind of protective talisman for the city.
I've always been preoccupied with the metaphysical identity of the city. How can one define the spirit of a city? What methodology could possibly capture such an identity?
Together with the team, we spent a lot of time thinking through how the project could take shape. I wanted to unite our ideas in an irrational way. A logical approach would have meant working with the city's legacy—The Slovo Building, the Executed Renaissance, Kharkiv's theatrical heritage... But I didn't want to look to the past.
We don't have time for the past.
We don't know if people will talk about us later. But we're sure that our presence here, in a frontline city during wartime, is exactly the kind of thing we used to read about—only back then, it was about others. We're proud of that legacy. But why not talk about ourselves in a way that would make us proud?
Kharkiv is shy in that sense. It's a trait of the city. Kharkiv can't just say, "Look how cool we are." It has to do it indirectly—or not at all. The city is pragmatic, but it struggles with self-presentation, and with self-identification too.
One night, I woke up and had a vision filled with images. I keep a symbolic dictionary that I compile from time to time. Some symbols are always with me. Others appear situationally and then disappear. That's how I test the strength of this language. During the full-scale war, this set of symbols became stable.
At first, there was so much death—so, skulls. Then hope—so, a bird. Then life coming back—so, a flower. And a Kharkiv building as I see it through the eyes of someone who grew up in Saltivka. It's like a little box with windows—many windows, all alike.
In that vision, I saw the characters of our story with these symbols instead of heads. An anthropomorphic being with a building instead of a head—meaning, the being is the city. These characters live in their own world, and that world is a ship.
At first, I thought the team would find my idea ridiculous. But they supported it. That's when the real work began. I started drawing a lot, and based on those drawings, the ship's hold appeared—a space where we gather as all kinds of crap comes at us from the northeast. We go down into the hold and talk about what to do with the ship so it doesn't sink. Or maybe it can sail—if we figure out how, and where to go? Maybe we can cast off from that dark, menacing, Mordor-like shore.
How do you keep the ship steady and stay afloat in the middle of a great storm? This exhibition isn't only about external threats coming from a neighboring country. It's also about internal ones—the fragile harmony between the city's inhabitants, which can be shattered by a single careless move, throwing the whole ship off balance.
Misto-Namysto is the central installation of the interactive exhibition. Visitors to the Literature Museum can model their own city, building neighborhoods where every house and every little wooden inhabitant is connected by the same string. Pull too hard—and everything collapses.
Kharkiv is reinforced concrete. But that's not enough. Reinforced concrete without people is just a fortress. And Kharkiv has many residents, and they don't want it to be just a fortress. They want it to live like a real, big city.
So Misto-Namysto is about horizontal connections: what holds us, what we hold onto, and how we hold together. That string—that's what lies between us. And that is the city. When many people are playing, they need to be very gentle. Because in a way, we're all stretched thin in this tug of war.
The project also included a performative element—members of the team tried on the masks of the story's key characters.
I wanted everyone to be out of their comfort zone. To feel strange, even to themselves, and for that to be a good thing. So that you speak not just from who you are—a poet, an architect, a philosopher, a literary scholar—but from the archetype you represent. So that your ego doesn't get in the way. "I am Death." And what could "I" say—as Death? That was the poetic-performative layer of the project.
The final form the project took was a graphic novel—a visual narrative of a shared experience of war.
Creating such a book was a childhood dream of mine. I just didn't have a story worth telling in this way—until now. The graphic novel explains and expresses the things we couldn't fully say within the project itself.
The book Imenem Mista was recently published by Oleksandr Savchuk Publishing. The texts were co-written by Kostyantyn and Ukrainian writer Natalka Marynchak.
The cycle has come to a close—and I like that. Because it speaks to the magic of the process we've been through. I believe this project changed a lot in us—and in the people who came to see it. Even visitors who seemed far removed from these concepts said they completely understood what we were trying to express.
My teacher, Vitalii Lenchyn, was probably the last representative of the avant-garde wave. His own teacher had taught at the academy back when the Kharkiv constructivist Vasyl Yermilov was still there. These were people who absorbed the final echoes of avant-garde methodologies—approaches that have largely not survived to this day.
To perceive the avant-garde purely as an aesthetic is a shallow view. What interests me is the avant-garde as a method, as a visual and plastic language.
Take Malevich's Black Square, for example—very few people can actually explain it. In truth, Black Square is about the formation of form. It is a pure abstract plastic language from which an alternate path in drawing, painting, and the very approach to the plane or to space itself begins.
My teacher didn't use the square—he used the cube. He had his own method, one he spent years developing, sacrificing his artistic career for it. He called this method an apple in the sheet, and he shared it only with a chosen few.
We met at the very end of his teaching career. I can truly call him my teacher, because he showed me how one can learn, teach, and draw in a completely different way—and achieve results far more effective than the conventional methods allow.
How do you draw a picture without a formal art education? I went to art school, but it never really taught me what to do. Sure, I have talent—I can draw something and it will come out expressive. But how do you, for example, draw a space from multiple angles, create a perspective, move the camera, light the scene properly? I might come up with a shape and want it to move, to glow. My teacher explained to me that what I was searching for was abstract form-building.
A sheet of paper isn't a flat surface—it's a space. And you can move through it freely, as long as you understand what a point is. The cube is that point. Once you grasp it, you can draw into space. Because a sheet is also a cube—you can enter it, exit it. It's three-dimensional.
Later, my teacher gave me exercises: abstract, unique, mind-bending tasks that broke my usual understanding of image-making. Perspective? It's optional. If you want it—use it. If you don't—don't. The key is that you can move freely within the sheet. While I was working on the Imenem Mista book, I kept thinking back to what my teacher taught me. In the three-dimensional space of the page, you can invent anything.
Although Kostiantyn Zorkin has a long string of completed projects behind him, he does not consider himself an artist who paints often.
I need many conditions to create freely. One of them is peace.
I was never calm. I am always learning patience. And woodworking is all about patience. I've become more patient than I used to be, but I haven't mastered patience in its fullest sense, in the Buddhist way.
What can real peace even be? Perhaps it's an illusion—you seem calm only because you're simply exhausted by the war. Emotional swings have rocked you so much that visually you no longer sway. Do I look calm now? I think so. But the reason is not because I'm calm, but because I'm not making unnecessary moves, I'm tired.
In addition to practical things, my teacher taught me to ask the question "Why?"
"Why did you pick up the brush?" This question marks the right kind of pause before starting the work. If you're painting to, say, gain recognition or approval, you fall into a trap. I have my own answer to the question "Why." If I can't find it, I destroy what I've created.
First of all, it's better to eat when you're hungry, rather than eating out of habit. In other words, it's more beneficial to paint when you truly feel the desire, not as a routine action. Secondly, images usually come to me on their own. I see them and can't not bring them to life. Then, there is the state of improvisation, the flow state. By the way, I haven't felt it in a while. And sometimes there are tasks, like illustrating a book.
It's both a functional and creative job. It reveals something in you, and you might end up with something unexpected. The issue of money in an artist's life also matters, of course, but it's not related to the artistic act itself.
I believe that strength should be felt in art. I always advise people to approach art as if meeting a person for the first time. We perceive other people not only with our eyes, mind, or words, but with our feelings. This person may appeal to you, or not. You might, on a primal level, feel danger in their presence. At first, you feel the energy of that person, and then that impulse is either neutralized or complicated by your thoughts. You try to compare this person to what you already know. If they resemble no one, you might not even recognize their strength. Sometimes, a person can be beautiful, but after looking at them for a while, you think, "So what?".It's the same with art. If you are an artist yourself, you start thinking about how it was made. That's next level. The hardest thing is, after seeing and doing so much, to return to that original, unprejudiced view—when you either feel it or you don't.
To recognize strength in art, you have to look at it a little longer than usual.
Art is about new experiences. Take Botticelli or Dürer, for example—they invented a way of perceiving the world, and this was a new experience, both for the people who observed their paintings and for the artists themselves. If it's not a new experience for either the artist or the viewer, then, in my opinion, it's not art.
To understand art, you need to be genuinely interested in it. And in times of war, you must also fight for it.
This publication was compiled with the support of the International Renaissance Foundation. It’s content is the exclusive responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily reflect the views of the International Renaissance Foundation.
