Vova Vorotniov (DE NE DE) / Ukraine

BIO:

Vova Vorotniov (b. 1979, currently based in Berlin) is a Ukrainian artist and member of the Ukrainian artists, curators and art historians collective De Ne De. His practice explores Soviet Ukrainian heritage, identity crisis across Europe, the condition of displacement, and the ongoing war in Ukraine. Working with various media—from primitive drawing and graphic design to formalist gestures and ready-made quotations—Vorotniov navigates the spectrum between museum-level representation and grassroots DIY culture. His work merges high-brow visual language with the immediacy of punk-ish merch, creating a hybrid aesthetic rooted in lived experience and cultural memory.

PROJECT:

The DE NE DE initiative plans to investigate Narva’s urban greening as part of a historically shaped urban landscape. The project focuses on how green spaces respond to changing political, social and economic conditions in a post-socialist city. One of the key methods will be to observe how local residents interact with urban greening – how they use, maintain, modify or ignore it. Special attention will be paid to the transformation of typical Soviet greening models: how they have been preserved, adapted or displaced by new approaches to urban development.

The research will also cover informal practices — self-planting, spontaneous gardens, neglected or “nobody’s” green areas. The work will include field research, including walks, visual documentation, and recording observations. The collected materials will become the basis for analytical and artistic interpretation, which will allow us to consider greening as a carrier of memory, ideology, and change in the urban environment.