Where the Souls Become Cranes
Interview
Nataliia Maloh, painter and curator, on the exhibition marking thirty five years of Ukrainian independence at ArtLab, the space she built from nothing on the shore of Lake Maggiore, and why she believes the deepest bridge between Ukraine and Italy is that neither has ever been culturally one thing.
Viacheslav Munister & Nataliia Maloh · 2026-09-12
Verbania sits on the shore of Lake Maggiore, in Piedmont, in the shadow of the Alps. At Via Baiettini 53, in a space that did not exist eighteen months ago, thirty five paintings by thirty five Ukrainian artists now hang under the title Ukraine. A Memory That Continues , one work for every year of Ukraine's independence, on view from 24 August through 30 September 2026. The space is called ArtLab, and it belongs to Nataliia Maloh, a Ukrainian painter and curator who arrived in Italy as an emigrant, found seasonal work, lost a winter to unemployment, and used the four idle months that followed to finally do what she had spent years postponing in a Kyiv office during her lunch breaks: paint.
The exhibition did not begin with the paintings. It began with a story Maloh wanted to tell, of land, of mothers, of cranes rising over cities left behind, and only afterward did she go looking for the works that could carry each part of it. The result reads less like a survey than a book, one canvas per page: a section called Madre Terra , Mother Earth, on the fields that fed generations and are now mined or occupied; a mother giving her sons a last kiss before their souls lift away as cranes; Italian landscapes that stand, in the show, as a quiet thank you to the country that took Ukrainians in.
We spoke with Maloh about the half basement room in Italy where she first picked up a brush again, the stranger at a Christmas market who pointed her toward the local art association, and why she believes the deepest cultural bridge between Ukraine and Italy has nothing to do with the two countries at all, and everything to do with the fact that neither of them has ever been culturally one thing.
Let's start with your own story. How did your path in art take shape, from your first creative instincts to your practice, your curatorial work, and your life in Italy? Was there a moment after which you stopped seeing yourself only as a painter, and began seeing yourself as someone who could build a space for other artists?
I can point to three moments that probably describe my path best.
The first is still in Ukraine. I had a normal office job in the city centre, nine to six, and during lunch breaks I kept finding myself in an art supply shop, buying paints and brushes and sketchbooks I would carry home and put in a cupboard, telling myself I would get to them eventually. Spoiler: in Ukraine, I never did.
The second is already in Italy. I worked through the summer season, and when it ended I registered for unemployment benefits. At some point it struck me, quite simply, that I was being paid and had four free months ahead of me, which meant I could finally do the thing I had wanted to do for years. I set up a small corner for myself in the half basement of the house we lived in. It was about thirteen degrees in there, so I worked in a coat, but after that there was no going back.
The third moment was my entry into the local Italian art scene, and it happened almost by accident. For a long time I thought nothing was happening in our city, no listings, no posters for anything interesting, apart from the Christmas markets. So I found out, stubbornly, who organised them, what paperwork I needed, even borrowed a proper market tent since they all had to match. I turned up at the 2024 Christmas market on the lakefront with a fifty by fifty sign, in Italian: “Looking for a place to exhibit my flower paintings.” At some point the town eccentric walked up, gave me the name and address of an association, and told me to go there. That chance encounter is, in fact, how I entered the local art world.
The desire and the ability to build something for other artists, I think, comes largely from my earlier professional life. In Ukraine I organised events for international technical assistance projects, so running an event, connecting people, carrying an idea from concept to execution, was a craft I already knew well before I ever thought of art as a profession. At some point those two halves of my life simply met: the need to create, and the experience of organising and bringing people together. That is when I understood that I was interested not only in making my own work, but in making a space where other artists could be seen.
What place has Italy come to occupy in your story? What changed in your understanding of art once you encountered Italian culture: its relationship to history, beauty, urban space, local heritage and everyday life? And has that experience changed how you look at Ukraine?
Italy, quite literally, warmed me. That is probably the most accurate way I can put it.
The sun here is so warm and there is so much light that at some point it became impossible to keep living and working the way I had before. When I first arrived I carried on, for a while, with the kind of work I had brought with me from Ukraine. But I started to feel a real dissonance: sun, a lake, mountains, extraordinary beauty, a completely different pace of life all around me, and I was still sitting in front of a computer, on the old script. At some point I simply asked myself: why keep doing something that no longer brings me joy, when life itself seems to be pushing me toward the thing I always wanted to do? So I consciously gave up my old work, and art arrived very naturally in its place, first the wish to paint, and later the wish to help other artists find their own way into the Italian art world.
Italy also changed how I see art itself. Here it does not exist apart from everyday life. It is in the architecture, on the streets, in small churches, old buildings, town squares. What struck me most, though, is how many ordinary people practise art in one form or another. A nurse, a doctor, a shop assistant can work all day at their profession and come home in the evening to paint, work in ceramics, take photographs, make music, make something with their hands, and nobody asks whether they are a real artist. Creativity is woven into life here in a very natural way. I think that gave me a kind of inner freedom: art does not have to start with permission, a diploma, or the day you decide to call yourself an artist. You can simply begin, because it is a need, and see where the path takes you.
I am also drawn to how carefully people here treat local history and heritage. Even a small town or a small association can have its own cultural tradition that people maintain and consider important. Which is probably why I started looking at Ukraine differently. When you live far from it, you begin to see, more sharply, the value of things that once seemed ordinary: our culture, our history, our local traditions. And you start wanting not just to talk about Ukraine, but to create opportunities for people to see it through art. What matters to me is that this should not run in one direction only, not just showing Ukrainian art inside my own space, but Ukrainian artists gradually entering the Italian cultural environment itself, meeting local artists, associations and curators, taking part in exhibitions beyond ArtLab. A simple example: today, 11 September, another exhibition opens featuring an artist whose work is currently showing at ArtLab as part of this show. That, to me, is one of the most important results of this work: when an acquaintance that began in my space goes on to have a life of its own in the wider Italian art scene.
So when I say Italy warmed me, it is not just a metaphor. I sometimes think it was literally the sun and the light here that pulled me out of my old life and made me ask myself a very simple question: if you have finally ended up somewhere good, why not let yourself do what you actually love? For me, the answer was art.
ArtLab in Verbania joins your own initiative with curatorial and public work. What cultural need was missing when the idea for ArtLab came to you? And what do you want the project to become in the long run: an exhibition space, a laboratory of exchange, a meeting point between cultures, or a mediator between artist, city and community?
It is simple and complicated at once. When I arrived in Verbania, one of my first impulses was to find a gallery and see contemporary Italian art. To my surprise, a Google Maps search for the whole city turned up almost nothing. Later, once I got to know the local scene better, I found the annual shows, the announcements for collective projects, the artists and associations. The art life here does exist, it is just somewhat fragmented. What was genuinely missing was a permanent, open space where contemporary art and the public could meet regularly. And it turned out I was not the only one who felt that. After ArtLab's first exhibition opened this July, many visitors told me almost the same thing: the town had been missing exactly this kind of place.
So I would not want to limit ArtLab to the word “gallery.” For me it is first of all a living space, one where art can be shown, but where it is just as important to introduce people to each other, to build new connections, to give artists the chance to be seen and heard. In the long run, I would like ArtLab to become a genuine meeting point: between artist and viewer, between the city and contemporary art, between different cultural environments, and, for me personally, above all between Ukraine and Italy. I like the idea that ArtLab does not have to be an endpoint for an artist, but rather a place where something begins for them: a new acquaintance, participation in another show, a collaboration with a local association or curator, a new project. When that happens, ArtLab is doing exactly what I built it to do: not just hanging art on a wall, but building an environment around it.
Italy is hard to understand through the idea of a single national culture. Piedmont, Lombardy, Veneto, Tuscany, Sardinia and Sicily each carry their own historical memory and visual language. Ukraine, too, is made up of many local cultural experiences. Do you see a shared model between the two countries, in which national identity is born not from flattening regional difference, but from preserving it?
Oh, absolutely, and it is one of the things about Italy that fascinates me most. Local identity here is extraordinarily strong. Dialects differ from region to region, sometimes entire regional languages differ, along with tradition, cuisine and architecture. A person can feel deeply Piedmontese, Sicilian, Venetian or Sardinian, and still be entirely Italian. There are other interesting parallels too. Many southern Italians have long moved north for work and better economic prospects, so within one country there are very different historical, social and economic experiences.
And yet, alongside all of that, “Italian-ness” is everywhere. Made in Italy, the tricolour, you see them on clothes, products, packaging, signage, even, absurdly, on a box of eggs. Behind it is a very clear message: this is ours, made here, and we are proud of it. Regional difference does not undermine national identity here. If anything, it seems to fill it. Italians are keenly aware of the enormous historical inheritance of their land, from antiquity and Rome to each region's own traditions, and they treat all of it as shared cultural capital.
That is where I really see a parallel with Ukraine. We too have never been culturally uniform, and I do not think we need to become so. Hutsulshchyna does not have to resemble Slobozhanshchyna, Odesa does not have to resemble Poltava, Zakarpattia does not have to resemble Donetsk. Every region has its own history, intonation, architecture, cuisine, music, tradition, even its own sense of space. I think the strength of a national culture lies not in making everyone the same, but in learning to see that difference as shared wealth. Perhaps that is what Italy has additionally taught me: you can love your small corner of a country deeply, protect its dialect, its traditions, its history, and it does not contradict a strong national identity at all. On the contrary, when a person knows exactly what they bring to the shared culture, that shared culture becomes stronger. I would like us to look at Ukraine the same way: not trying to erase our differences for the sake of unity, but understanding that Ukraine is precisely made of them.
The Italian idea of territorio joins geography, architecture, craft, landscape, family memory and a way of life. For Ukraine, after occupation, displacement and the destruction of cities, the bond between a person and a specific place has taken on particular weight. Could this category become one of the languages through which an Italian viewer comes to understand contemporary Ukrainian art more deeply?
Yes, absolutely. The exhibition has a section called Madre Terra, Mother Earth, and through it I try to explain to Italian visitors that for a Ukrainian, land is far more than territory in the geographic sense. I talk about our fields, the fertility of Ukrainian soil, the symbolism of our flag's colours, blue sky over golden wheat fields, and then explain that today part of those fields is occupied, part is mined, part is contaminated by the war. Land that fed generations becomes, literally, dangerous to human life. I think Italians understand this through territorio particularly well, because there is also a very strong emotional bond here between a person and their land, their city, their house, their local landscape.
But in this exhibition I try to speak less in the language of facts than in the language of symbols and universal human emotion. I talk about the war through the image of a mother giving her sons a last kiss, their souls lifting away as cranes into eternity. You do not need to be Ukrainian to understand that image, or even to know the history of this war in detail. Almost everyone, in their own life, has lost someone, and knows what the pain of loss feels like, and so can come close, at least emotionally, to what Ukrainian mothers losing their children are living through today.
One moment at the exhibition stayed with me. An Italian woman came in with her three children, and as I told her about this work, the cranes, the mother, the last kiss, I watched her eyes fill with tears. In that moment I understood I had given her something far larger than information about the war in Ukraine.
That is why I believe so strongly in symbolism. Symbols do not need translating the way words do. Land, home, mother, child, road, water, bird, parting, return: these are images that exist in almost every culture. I do not think I could convey the Ukrainian experience to an Italian viewer as well through dates and figures and chronology as I can through the image of land you love and might lose, a home you cannot return to, a mother saying goodbye to her child. Through these, the distance between the Ukrainian and the Italian experience suddenly becomes much smaller. So yes, territorio can be one such language. But more broadly, I would say art lets you speak about a very specific Ukrainian experience through universal human feeling. And that is the moment a viewer stops treating Ukraine as something distant they hear about in the news, and starts to feel it through their own life.
The exhibition's title itself treats memory not as a finished past but as a process. When you present Ukrainian artists to an Italian audience, how do you handle the difficult curatorial problem of speaking about the war and the contemporary Ukrainian experience, without letting the war become the only lens through which Europe reads Ukrainian culture?
I try to speak through symbols and emotions available to anyone, regardless of nationality. Everyone has lost someone, so everyone can understand the pain of the thousands of Ukrainian mothers saying goodbye to their sons today. I speak about Ukrainian land through the image of a woman in a field, the earth as mother, as the source of life, as part of our identity. I speak about forced emigration through cranes rising over cities and fields, leaving familiar places behind and setting out in search of a new home. Through Italian landscapes I thank Italy and Italians for the shelter they gave us, and tell the story of how many of us found a second home here. But alongside that there remains a memory of the first one. In our memory the echo of our apartment blocks lives on, our familiar streets, the lights of our cities, all the everyday life we left behind one day.
So the war is present in this exhibition, and it would be dishonest to try to avoid it. It is today part of the Ukrainian experience. But for me it is essential that Ukraine is not represented only through war, destruction and death. Ukraine in this show is also land, home, motherhood, love, memory, the road, the search for a new home, the ability to begin life again. It is longing for what was left behind, and gratitude toward those who took us in. It is a country living through war, whose culture did not begin with that war and will not end with it.
The exhibition itself was built in a somewhat unusual way. First I had the story I wanted to tell, and only afterward did I start choosing the works to fit under it, moving from concept to painting rather than the other way round. Each work became something like an illustration of one part of that story, almost like an image in a book: one speaks of land, another of loss, the next of emigration, of the search for home, of memory, of hope. Together they form one continuous narrative. That is probably why the title carries the words “a memory that continues.” Memory, for me, is not only what stayed in the past. It keeps shaping our present: how we see new places, how we build a new home, how we perceive the people around us, and how we tell our own story to others. I would like an Italian visitor to leave not simply thinking, “I saw an exhibition about the war in Ukraine,” but feeling: “I understand a little better the people living through this, and the country they carry with them.”
Ukraine and Italy share unexpectedly many structural parallels: strong craft traditions, a cult of material, local schools, sacred art, knowledge passed down through families, a particular weight given to home and land. At the same time, twentieth century Italian art, Arte Povera in particular, taught artists to treat simple materials as carriers of memory and meaning. Where do you personally see the most interesting ground for a genuine Ukrainian Italian artistic dialogue, one that goes beyond formal cultural diplomacy and surface resemblance?
I think the most interesting dialogue begins exactly where we stop deliberately looking for similarities between Ukraine and Italy. Cultural diplomacy often works to a familiar formula: bring Ukrainian art, show it to an Italian audience, talk about Ukraine, and the meeting of the two cultures more or less ends there. That is not enough for me. I am far more interested in creating a situation where a Ukrainian and an Italian artist end up in the same space and start talking about things that matter to both, but each from their own cultural experience. It could be the theme of home, land, memory, family, migration, loss, water, landscape. Even the same material can carry an entirely different memory in two cultures. Earth means something different to a Piedmontese artist and to a Ukrainian one, and it is precisely that difference that creates a real dialogue.
I find it especially interesting to work not only with the big national categories of “Ukraine” and “Italy,” but to move down to a local level. For example, placing side by side the experience of a Ukrainian artist for whom the steppe, the field or an industrial city matters, and an artist from the shores of Lake Maggiore, for whom the formative childhood images are mountains, water, stone, small old towns, and seeing what emerges between those two experiences. The same applies to craft and material. I am deeply drawn to the idea that an ordinary thing, wood, cloth, metal, stone, earth, an old object, can be not just material to work with, but a carrier of memory. There is a great deal of common ground between Ukrainian and Italian traditions here, without needing to force the resemblance. That is why it matters to me that ArtLab gradually becomes more than a place where Italians are shown Ukrainian artists. I would like to build genuine Ukrainian Italian projects, where artists work around a single theme but speak about it each in their own language. Real cultural dialogue, for me, is not when we say “look how alike we are,” and it is not one culture explaining itself to another. It begins when two different cultures ask each other questions, and each ends up seeing itself a little differently as a result.
Much of today's Ukrainian European cultural connection is, understandably, built around support and solidarity. But what should come next? If you imagined a permanent cultural route between Ukraine and Italy, between artists, small towns, workshops, independent spaces and local communities, what shared questions would you build it around? And what role could ArtLab play in that longer term dialogue?
I think the next important step is the move from support and solidarity toward a full professional exchange. Today, quite understandably, many Ukrainian cultural projects in Europe arise in the context of war and the wish to support Ukraine, and we are endlessly grateful for that support. But in the long run, I would like a Ukrainian artist to be invited not because they represent a country at war, but because they are interesting as an artist: for their language, their ideas, their technique, their way of seeing the world.
That is why I see real potential in ongoing exchange: residencies, joint exhibitions, exchanges between artists, workshops, independent spaces and local communities. I am particularly interested in the level of small towns. Cultural exchange does not have to happen only between Kyiv, Milan or Rome. Small towns have their own memory, cultural energy, their own artists and their own audience. I would build such a route around very simple and universal questions: what does home mean to us? How does the place where we were born or live shape who we are? How do we hold on to memory? What happens to a person when they change countries? How can tradition live inside contemporary art? How does a local culture become part of a global one without losing its own voice?
In that system, I see ArtLab as one small point on a much larger cultural route. In the long term, I would like to expand ArtLab's format into an artist residency, so I could invite artists from around the world, and especially from Ukraine, to live and work here for a time, meet local artists and cultural institutions, exchange experience and create joint projects. And I have one further goal: for ArtLab to become a kind of springboard for Ukrainian artists into the international art world. Not a place where an artist shows one work once, but a place after which the next contact, the next exhibition, the next collaboration follows. That work, in fact, is already under way. Over time, I would like us to talk less about “supporting Ukrainian art” and more about its natural presence in the European cultural space. For me, that will be the real sign that we have moved from solidarity to a genuine, long term cultural dialogue.
Ukraine. A Memory That Continues (35. Ucraina. Una memoria che continua) is on view at ArtLab, Via Baiettini 53, Verbania (VB), Italy, from 24 August to 30 September 2026. Guided visits are available by appointment.