Pixelated Realities presented installation Kolotanz at the Festival of Future Nows 2025

The Ukrainian creative team Pixelated Realities, consisting of Fedir Boitsov, Alik Kadoum and Iana Boitsova, and co-curated by Alona Karavai presented a new installation, Kolotanz, at the Festival of Future Nows, which took place from October 31 to November 2, 2025, at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin.

The third edition of the festival brought together around 100 international artists and collectives, offering an extensive program of performances, happenings, sound and audio works, choreographies, dance, workshops, and artistic interventions. Organized in partnership between the Neue Nationalgalerie and the Institut für Raumexperimente, and supported by the Hauptstadtkulturfonds and the American Academy in Berlin, the festival continued its mission to serve as a laboratory for contemporary art and future-oriented thought.

Kolotanz explores the question:

What role does digitized heritage play in shaping the identity of the human being of tomorrow? Can digital preservation help us remain true to ourselves? In the museum of the future, who will gaze upon a digital artifact, and what will they feel — especially when the fate of the original remains uncertain?

Kolotanz consists of an interactive installation and video Before War – After War. The artworks are exploring 3D scanning documentation of Martynov Palace of Culture in Bakhmut, 2023, before the occupation, and the first exhibition of Odesa National Fine Arts Museum after the full-scale russian aggression against Ukraine in 2022.

Kolotanz is inspired by ancient Indo-European pagan traditions that mark the renewal of life and the beginning of the season each May. This duality—celebration and sorrow, homecoming and parting—lies at the heart of Kolotanz.

“Museum spaces, cultural centers, their interiors and collections are deeply embedded in local identity. The processes of dismantling, evacuating, and conserving collections — whether to protect them from looting, natural disasters, or war — are profoundly unsettling for communities who continue to live amid danger”, said Iana Boitsova, Head of the Pixelated Realities PO. “Across the world, cultural heritage becomes a site of both vulnerability and resilience during conflict. When international heritage is threatened in a distant land, who bears the loss? And when a digital copy becomes the only surviving trace, does it transform into the artifact itself?”.

The work merges the atmosphere of a classical artifact museum with that of a contemporary gallery, creating a hybrid space where boundaries between past and present dissolve. Kolotanz features digitized heritage sites alongside contemporary Ukrainian art, exploring two temporalities — before and after the war. This concept builds upon the earlier works first presented in 2022 in Lviv at the Museum of Ukrainian Victory exhibition.