July in Kyiv is a month that many people tend to underestimate. It seems as though everyone has left, that the city has emptied out a bit, that cultural life has come to a standstill until September, and so on.
But this is a misleading impression. In fact, it’s precisely in July—when there are no major premieres or high-profile openings—that the city hosts quieter events that are no less interesting for that. Exhibitions that make you stop and think. Festivals in neighborhoods you don’t usually get to visit. Movies you’ve been wanting to see for a long time but keep putting off.
The UA.News editorial team has selected events from the first half of July that you shouldn’t miss—and that are sure to be unlike anything you usually attend. Read more in our article.
Exhibition: “New Military Landscape”
Address: National Museum “Kyiv Art Gallery,” 9 Tereshchenkivska St.
Dates: through July 12
There are changes that happen slowly and almost imperceptibly, but one day you realize that you’re looking at a familiar landscape in a completely different way. This is the theme of an exhibition by Odessa-based artists and military personnel Igor Gusev and Stas Zhalobnyuk, who work under the collective name Forest Brothers. More than 30 large-format paintings, each exploring how war transforms not only people but also the space around them: fields, roads, trees, and horizons. What we’ve come to regard as merely a backdrop to human events now carries its own heavy memory.
Forest Brothers work in large formats with a slow, attentive painting style. Looking at “The New Military Landscape,” you begin to notice details you hadn’t seen before: how the color of the grass has changed, how the horizon line has taken on a different meaning, how even an ordinary field can be both beautiful and indescribably heavy.
Chocolocal.BLOB Festival
Address: Chokolivka. 9/21 Volynska St. (Ostrov Platform)
Dates: through July 12
The Solomyanskyi District isn’t the kind of place people usually go to for culture. There are no galleries with famous names on their signs, no trendy coffee shops with lines out the door, and no tourist routes. And that’s exactly why you should go there!
Every year, the Chocolocal.BLOB architecture and urbanism festival proves a simple truth: cultural life isn’t limited to the city center—it exists wherever there are people who want to make a difference in their surroundings. This year, the festival is once again transforming Chokolivka into a venue for a major conversation about what a city should be like and what “public space” actually means in times when everything around us is unstable.
Lectures by architects and urban planners, open-air installations, performances, workshops, and discussions—all of this unfolds against the backdrop of an ordinary Kyiv courtyard. And it’s worth it!
METANOIA Exhibition
Address: Imagine Point Gallery, 86/1 Holosiivskyi Avenue
Dates: through July 18
The word “metanoia” comes from ancient Greek—and means not just “change,” but a profound inner transformation, a reevaluation of everything you once believed in. That’s exactly how you feel after seeing the joint exhibition by Olesia Rybchenko and Yuriy Voitovych: two artists who share the same roots but have taken completely different paths.
Both are followers of the traditions of the Ukrainian school of painting. But while Rybchenko delves into the subtle psychology of color, into the almost meditative stillness of her works, where every shade is a distinct emotion, Voytovych opts for monumental symbolism, forms that carry their own weight and command the viewer’s gaze.
The central theme that unites them both is the Kyiv Botanical Garden. For this family of artists, this place has become an inexhaustible source of poetic inspiration—a space where nature lives by its own laws, indifferent to human anxieties and yet remarkably sensitive to the mood of those who visit it. The exhibition unfolds as a dialogue between two very different languages, and it is precisely in this tension between them that a third element is born—one that is difficult to put into words but can be felt quite easily.
Exhibition “Self-Employed”
Address: PinchukArtCentre, 1–3/2 Velyka Vasylkivska St.
Dates: through August 30
“Self-Employed” is a title that sounds like a bureaucratic term, but is actually a very accurate description of what this exhibition is about. Six young Ukrainian artists who continue to work despite everything—despite lost studios, despite shelling, despite conditions in which making art seems almost impossible. While the project was being prepared, the State Migration Service ordered the evacuation of the Institute of Automation, where many of the artists’ studios were located. And on May 24, a massive shelling of Kyiv damaged nine cultural institutions, including the National Art Museum of Ukraine.
The works are not displayed in traditional exhibition halls, but on staircases, shelves, in niches, and in the art center’s storage room—on the periphery of the public’s field of vision and the familiar “white cube.” This is a fundamental decision: the works exist in a state of limbo, between visibility and invisibility, between recognition and its absence. The works themselves consist of found materials and improvised means—or are earned through artistic practice elsewhere. Examples from the artists’ lives include: assembling drones, teaching, monetizing erotic content, and office work at an IT company.
The film “Sorrentino’s Summer”
Location: movie theaters in Kyiv
Dates: July 9–12
There are directors whose work must be seen on the big screen; otherwise, something important is lost. Paolo Sorrentino is one of them. His films are always a blend of luxury and melancholy, flawless cinematography and the inner emptiness hidden behind it, sharp irony and pain that is anything but ironic. Watching Sorrentino at home on a laptop is roughly like listening to a symphony orchestra over the phone: technically, it’s the same thing, but in reality, it’s not at all.
On the initiative of the Italian Embassy in Ukraine, the Italian Cultural Institute, and the film company “Arthouse Traffic,” a retrospective will begin on July 9 in select theaters “Sorrentino’s Summer”—featuring three landmark works by the Oscar-winning director. *The Great Beauty* — an Oscar-winning story about 65-year-old Roman journalist Jep Gambardella, who observes the glamour and emptiness of high-society Rome with gentle irony and gradually begins to understand something very important about his own life. It’s the kind of movie that leaves you wanting to just sit quietly and reflect, with no need to rush anywhere.
“Youth” is a leisurely, almost hypnotic film about two old friends in a Swiss sanatorium: about what remains of a person at the end, and about whether it’s still possible to change anything when it seems too late. “Grace” rounds out the program. Together, the three films form a unified portrait of a director who knows how to speak about the most difficult things so beautifully that this beauty becomes painful. The perfect choice for an atmospheric July evening.
“City of Strength” Exhibition
Address: Avangarden, 23a Sichovykh Striltsiv St.
Dates: through July 27
Kyiv is a city that has been the subject of thousands of writings, hundreds of films, and countless paintings. But the Avangarden Gallery invites you to see it anew—and in a slightly different light.
“City of Strength” is a large-scale multidisciplinary project that explores Kyiv as a living space of memory, culture, everyday experience, and inner resilience. Through painting, photography, graphic art, sculpture, poetry, and other media, the exhibition creates a multi-layered portrait of the city, ranging from historical symbols to the rhythms of contemporary daily life.
What makes this project special is its scale and diversity. Here, the city speaks simultaneously in different languages and formats: sometimes through a large canvas, sometimes through intimate prints, and sometimes through sculpture or a poetic text on a wall. Together, they form a portrait you won’t find in any guidebook!
