Sam Lewitt: Шубін (SHUBIN)

RIBBON International presents Sam Lewitt’s site responsive work Шубін (SHUBIN) as part of Pavilion 13’s reopening as a centre for contemporary art in Kyiv, renovated by ФОРМА (FORMA) architectural office.

Шубін (SHUBIN) is the result of a multi-year dialog with ФОРМА architectural office. Lewitt’s contribution examines the contemporary relevance of Pavilion 13 as a former showcase for coal mining in Ukraine. The work approaches the building through questions about representation and resources, exhibition and extraction.

Lewitt’s work is made up of specially designed signage, sculptural works, a film work produced and displayed on site, as well as a collaboratively organised summer program. Шубін (SHUBIN) treats the pavilion as both stage and actor, reflected in the mirror of its own image. Eponymous with the work’s title, the proper name Shubin invokes a myth drawn from eastern Ukrainian mining culture – the same culture that the building was constructed to exhibit. Often depicted in a fur coat (‘shuba’, ‘шуба’), Shubin is sometimes figured as the spirit of a benevolent miner, sometimes as a cruel mine owner out to cause harm, and always as a fickle emissary of the mines. In the context of exhibition-making, this name can summon an absent spectator, who exited the pavilion’s scenography with shifts of the national economy toward global commodity supply-chains. Viewed from a different perspective, the name might simply be understood as an epithet for an American artist attempting to reflexively engage with these very local histories.

Different light sources—natural, artificial, reflected in glass and steel, sedimented in coal—form a constellation by which the subject of Шубін begins to appear. This is initiated at the entrance of Pavilion 13 with a neon sign whose typography, hand-drawn by Lewitt after Kyiv Type Foundry’s Rublena font (‘the most used black grotesk font in the USSR’’), recalls the ubiquitous signage from the building’s opening in 1967. This light source bleeds in, is absorbed and reflected by chalk and polished steel reproductions of a coal and iron display, located outside the building since its opening.

Beyond these reproductions, viewers encounter a looping video displayed on a large-format LED screen. The video takes the audienceon a flythrough of the pavilion—tracing a path from its façade, through the interior, and back again, with a single stop along the way. This journey is accompanied by a dense soundtrack including a dialogue on the material entanglement of coal, steel, neon, and the semiconductors that make the recording and display of Lewitt’s video possible. The commercial LED screen on which the work is displayed further engages the interplay of transparency and opacity that shapes the pavilion experience: displacing Modernist associationsof glass with cognitive clarity by introducing an internal burst of technical illumination, governed by the screen’s mineral-based processing architecture.

A program of talks and screenings titled SHUBIN Talks will take place during the run of Шубін. Co-organized with curator Maria Noschenko and editor Katia Khimei, this program features artists, academics, miners and engineers focusing on the history as well as critical questions about the reality and representation of resource extraction in Ukraine and beyond.

The renovation of Pavilion 13 is overseen by Iryna Miroshnykova and Oleksii Petrov, partners at ФОРМА, and co-founders of the Ukrainian cultural institution Pavilion of Culture, together with Sasha Andrusyk, Lizaveta German and Maria Lanko, Olga Balashova, Victor Glushchenko.

Sam Lewitt

Sam Lewitt (Los Angeles, 1981) is an artist living in Berlin. Recent solo exhibitions include Miguel Abreu Gallery (NY), Galerie Buchholz (DE), Z33 House of Contemporary Art (BE), Swiss Institute/ Contemporary Art (NY), Kunsthalle Basel (CH), CCA Wattis Institute of Contemporary Art (SF). His work has been featured in major group exhibitions such as the Dunkirk Triennial of Contemporary Art and Industry (FR), MoMA (NY), Centre Pompidou (FR), the 57th Venice Biennale (IT), Vienna Secession (AT), Kunsthall Bergen (NO), la Panacée (FR) and the 2012 Whitney Biennial (NY) among others.

Opening Program

19 June 2025

19:00 – 21:00Launch reception to mark the launch of newly renovatedPavilion 13/Шубін (SHUBIN)

Welcome by ФОРМА (Iryna Miroshnykova and Oleksii Petrov),Sam Lewitt and VDNG

20 June 2025

SHUBIN Talks: On Coal, Water and Other Resources in Donbas

11:00 – 12:30

Tour of the Underground Section of Pavilion 13 by Serhii Lukovenko, Researcher of Donetsk regional history, founder and author of the blog Staryi Rudnyk (Eng. Old Mine)

12:30 – 14:00Discussion: The Technical Death of Mines

Volodymyr Prykhodko, PhD, Associate Professor of theDepartment of Theoretical and Practical Philosophy at Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv

Serhii Lukovenko

Kateryna Khimei, Editor

Moderated by Maria Noshchenko, Researcher and curator

14:15 – 14:45Lecture: The Mining of Dreams, The Mining of the World:Coal to Colour to Capital

Esther Leslie, Professor of Political Aesthetics, School of Creative Arts, Culture and Communication at Birkbeck, University of London

15:00 – 16:30

Lecture: Atmospheres of War: Climate, Occupation,and the Ecology of Violence

Svitlana Matvienko, Associate Professor of Critical Media Analysis, School of Communication at Simon Fraser University