VARVARA UHLIK

SCULPTURE & INSTALLATION:

PLAY GROUND II
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LYOH
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PLAY GROUND
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SWAN
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DIGITAL (AFTER)
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PLAYLAND
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PHOTOGRAPHY:

SUNSHINE, HOW ARE YOU?
^(2023-2024)
SLAV GAZE
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PLAY GROUND

2025

Play Ground (2025)

Three steel sculptures, water, black dye

Play Ground reconstructs the architecture of my post-Soviet childhood. Three steel sculptures (a swing, a slide, and a rocket) are drawn from memory and archival references, modelled on the standardised playgrounds common across Ukraine and the former USSR. They reveal how ideology embeds itself in everyday forms, shaping imagination and identity, enforcing control, and leaving lasting trauma.

Stripped of function and set in an environment that feels suspended, the sculptures sit between ruin and monument, nostalgia and unease. What once stood for innocence now feels shaped by violence, a quiet echo of systems that have not disappeared but only shifted.

The work extends this outward, reading Ukraine itself as a political playground: a territory caught between empires for much of its history, and today positioned within global negotiations, extractive deals, and mineral trades. Play becomes a way of seeing how childhood, nationhood, and agency are shaped by forces far beyond them.

I have built only the top halves of the three sculptures, so they appear submerged, never revealing their full structure, never letting you see their end or their root. Steel also ties the work to the industrial materials still produced in Ukraine today, and in my hometown of Dnipro in particular. The installation occupied the second floor of a 19th-century building, where the room was temporarily flooded with black water, turning the playground into a hauntingly infinite landscape.

INSTALLATION

SCULPTURES

Slide (2025)

Mild steel

Slide, detail (2025)

Mild steel

Swing (2025)

Mild steel

Swing, detail (2025)

Mild steel

Rocket (2025)

Mild steel

Rocket, detail (2025)

Mild steel