Review ‘Pedagogies of War’ at TBA Madrid

by Adela Lovric // June 12, 2026

In collaboration with TBA21, the Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum in Madrid presents ‘Pedagogies of War,’ an exhibition by Ukrainian artists Roman Khimei and Yarema Malashchuk. In the exhibition foreword, curator Chus Martínez sets up the main premise of the show via Kant’s positing that war is not a natural instinct or a sudden breakdown of order, but a practice that states actively learn to perform. In parallel to that thought, she proposes art as a practice of unlearning war. Through image-making, she argues, art “re-educates perception by exposing the historical construction of what presents itself as natural or inevitable.”

Khimei and Malashchuk’s work targets habit⁠—specifically, habitual ways of feeling and seeing shaped by the way media images influence and dull our perception⁠—as the greatest obstacle to political change. In contrast, the two artists seek to interrupt the automatic mode of spectatorship, giving way to critical observation of the conditions that shape our present. Across the four works gathered in ‘Pedagogies of War,’ they redirect the viewer’s attention, approaching the experience of war from different angles.

Roman Khimei and Yarema Malashchuk: ‘Pedagogies of War,’ 2026, presented by the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza and TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, audiovisual installation ‘We Didn´t Start This War’ // Photo by TBA21 | Maru Serrano

The exhibition opens with ‘The Wanderer’ (2022), a five-channel video installation composed of carefully staged cinematic tableaux that evoke war and death without explicitly showing either. Recreating the postures of fallen Russian soldiers, their lifeless limbs sprawled across the rocky terrain of the Carpathian Mountains, the artists enact a symbolic gesture of revenge against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The work references ‘If I Were a German’ (1994), a photographic series by Fast Reaction Group that reenacted the actions of German soldiers during the Nazi occupation of Kharkiv. Its title, however, points to Caspar David Friedrich’s iconic painting ‘Wanderer above the Sea of Fog’ (1818), with its associations of Romantic heroism, nationalism and the notion of the sublime. In the face of contemporary warfare—experienced in real time and on an unprecedented visual scale—Khimei and Malashchuk challenge the Western tendency to romanticize death and destruction as something sublime.

In the following room, the two-channel video installation ‘Open World’ (2025) lends a view into the lives of Ukrainians three years into the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine. Combining video-game streaming with documentary footage, the work follows a Ukrainian boy who fled the country and reconnects with his family, friends and neighbors through a hacked military robotic dog, operated remotely. Once a weapon and a tool of resistance, the robot dog becomes a messenger collapsing the distance between those who left and those who remained. Absolved of its intended purpose, it is almost endearing⁠; more of a pet than a machine.

Yarema Malashchuk and Roman Khimei: ‘Open World,’ 2025, still, double-channel video installation, color, sound, produced by TBA21–Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary for the 36th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts, 2025. Supported by the Pontevedra Art Biennial // Courtesy of the artists

As the exhibition progresses, the space begins to feel increasingly like a shelter. This sensation is most pronounced in a room lined with soft-pink curtains and matching flooring, which create an atmosphere of comfort and protection. The feeling of being hugged by a warm blanket potentiates the emotional resonance of ‘You Shouldn’t Have to See This’ (2024), a silent, six-channel video installation placed across the room⁠. Capturing the sweetness and innocence of children sleeping, the images are deceptively simple. Yet the knowledge underpinning them transforms their meaning: the children portrayed were forcibly deported to Russian-controlled territory and later returned to Ukraine. Estimates of such abductions range from tens of thousands to over a million cases since 2014.

Roman Khimei and Yarema Malashchuk: ‘Pedagogies of War,’ 2026, presented by the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza and TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, audiovisual installation ‘You Shouldn´t Have to See This’ // Photo by TBA21 | Maru Serrano

Against this backdrop, the room’s comforting pink tones acquire a darker resonance, recalling violence rendered latent rather than absent. The work, however, refuses to define its subjects through victimhood. By filming the children sleeping, Khimei and Malashchuk temporarily release them from the images of abduction through which they have been publicly represented. The children appear neither as evidence nor as symbols, but simply as children. As Martínez puts it, “the very presence of those children insists on the existence of all Ukrainian people.” Their visibility becomes an affirmation of continuity in the face of an ongoing attempt at erasure.

The exhibition concludes with ‘We Didn’t Start This War’ (2026), a three-channel video work that precisely captures the feeling of suspension under constant threat of war. Everyday scenes unfold: people walk down the street, shop for groceries, go to work or school. Little happens. Occasionally an unexpected loud sound is heard, or someone slips and falls⁠—normal interruptions that briefly puncture the expectation of something far more brutal happening, resulting in a sort of anti-climax. The real drama unravels in the unspoken, collective tension that enters the viewer’s psyche⁠—an anticipation of what might occur at any given moment, shattering the thin veneer of normalcy and ripping away the provisory peace, whether for a moment or for eternity.

Roman Khimei & Yarema Malashchuk: ‘We Didn’t Start this War,’ 2026, still // Courtesy of the artists

War, the piece suggests, extends far beyond physical destruction. It inhabits bodies, psyches and shared reality constructs. It structures how people imagine the future and how they relate to one another in the present. A work in which “nothing happens” produces an embodied awareness of suspended time and chronic vigilance. Rather than representing wartime experience, it approximates one of its emotional conditions.

In war, life splits into a before and an after. Even when the bombs stop falling, nothing returns unchanged. For some, these ruptures remain forever embedded in memory and identity. For others, who observe from the sidelines, war is mediated through images and felt in spurts of empathy, which paradoxically fall flat with the increased circulation of visual horror across news feeds and screens. As Martínez notes, media images of war often package brutality within seamless narratives of realism and immediacy, generating catharsis while leaving the structures through which violence is perceived intact. They train spectatorship rather than challenge it. The importance of ‘Pedagogies of War’ lies in its refusal of this logic. Rather than overwhelming viewers with evidence, Khimei and Malashchuk cultivate forms of attention that resists habituation. In doing so, they teach us to reconnect with the severed sense of being active constituents of the present, capable of determining its course.

Exhibition Info

Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum

Roman Khimei and Yarema Malashchuk: ‘Pedagogies of War’
Exhibition: Mar. 3–June 21, 2026
tba21.org
P.º del Prado, 8, Centro, 28014 Madrid, Spain, click here for map