Ukraine

Pavlo Makov is an artist from Kharkiv whose practices in the early 1990s focused on exploring the parallels between the human body and urban landscape. The artwork The Fountain of Exhaustion, originally created in 1995, was intended as a paradoxical symbol of life: one river flows into another, and yet both become exhausted and run dry. Since then, the fountain has never been integrated into urban space and has never fully functioned as a processual object with actual water input. The project has only gained relevance over the last twenty-seven years, breaking free from the limiting context of the Eastern European metropolis of its birth and growing to stand for the global exhaustion of culture, economy, and politics. In view of the ongoing pandemic, it came to represent the accumulation of exhaustion.