Creating VR with teenager & child artists in Kharkiv, Ukraine

The future of art is developing inside a new generation of world citizens.

While creating VR together with Ukrainian teenagers and children at studio Aza Nizi Maza in a former bomb shelter in central Kharkiv I’m learning more than ever. The future of art is developing inside a new generation of world citizens. Community and trust are key.

Text, film and photos by Leo Erken

Текст українською мовою

Reading time text: 15-20 minutes.

Suddenly it’s getting really dark. I’m in a van with six other people. They’re all female Ukrainian refugees living in western Europe visiting their own homes, husbands, parents, children and friends. The women have been picked up from their (new) homes in The Netherlands and Germany and together we have been on this bus for more than 35 hours. The city I see outside my window is named Poltava, which is only one hour away from my destination Kharkiv. The driver has difficulties dodging the holes in the road, sometimes he misses one making the van shake heavily. The woman next to me says she feels sorry for the van. The driver is not worried, he says, ‘You all will be home soon and the Amsterdam guy will be at his hotel in no time..’

From my window Poltava looks like an enormous village. Lot’s of small houses, impossible roads, no street lights and, this evening, hardly any other cars. My seat is at the door, when someone has to get out, I make way. An elderly lady says goodbye to us from her doorstep, I get the chance to have a quick look around her street. There is no asphalt or even a brick road here but she does live in a flat.

When I arrive at my hotel, Sophia, a young receptionist, says she has been worried about me, the only foreigner on her list. ‘You came by van? Okay.., you have been here before and seem to know the drill. You have the alarm app, yes? Please give me your Ukrainian phone number for emergencies. Today has been quiet, but yesterday was crazy, drones flying above the building. Our shelter is also the breakfast room. You’re on the third floor. Have a good night!’

The next morning I meet Varvara Korotchenko outside the hotel. She will help me with translations and is the only one of the central group of young artists working at studio Aza Nizi Maza who I did not meet before.

She is all in pink. ‘How old are you?’, I ask. ‘I’m 15’, she says, ‘How old are you?’ I have to re-set myself, this young woman, who will be key to my communications in the coming days, could have been my grandchild.
‘Don’t worry about your age’, she says, ‘you move around, get to places, do stuff, you’re not that old!’

Varvara is an old soul herself. The war made her spend time in France and the United States and, since she got back to Ukraine, gave her a lot of independence to deal with. Mother and sister are living in another town for safety reasons and her father is also on the move a lot. ‘I’m doing fine, school is great and my artist practice is developing. Don’t worry about me please’, she says.

We walk through the wide open streets of the city, talk about art and her experiences of returning back to war. Varvara chooses her words carefully: ‘I didn’t fully understand war until I came back to Ukraine. I know that people get mad with others because they’re not ‘thinking enough’ about the war, but really, it’s hard to think about it much when you’re not living in it. Forgetting or not thinking about the bad things that are happening until you’re not directly affected by it is not really ignorance, in my opinion. When I was in the US, I wasn’t making art or posting about it and now in Ukraine, where most of my friends are artists and I’m in that social circle, I get to see the reaction of people to art. Everyone is really open minded about it, you could say. Art is a really big part of my life now and in everyone around me as well. I guess in war times it’s a part of people’s lives because it reflects certain feelings we all experience. I appreciate the art dealing with reflections on war and the scary feelings that it brings, but I also think that it’s really important to picture the happy moments and right now I see more of that happening. I think that’s nice because sometimes it seems like we can’t fully experience happy stuff because of all the grief that we feel every day’.

We are interrupted by my alarm app and sirens from all kinds of directions. Nobody on the street seems to react. ‘The area covered by the official alarm app is really wide’, Varvara says. ‘There are groups on Telegram that are more useful’. On her instructions I join a group that is run by a single person who does not seem to sleep. This guy interpens all available alarm sources and creates Google maps screenshots combined with images of drones. It works as a community, people respond and give additional information. I learn to read the emoticons first. When I see many angry faces I use Google translate immediately. An unknown Ukrainian word often links to the nature of an area; industrial district or energy hub. Alarm, I learn, is one thing, interpreting the alarm is a community issue. When the next day we hear a ‘kaboom’ sound, all the people around, including Varvara, start searching on their phones. ‘Eight kilometers’, she says.

To get to the studio, we have to cross a small square with the bust of Ukrainian writer Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky (1864-1913) on top of a high pedestal. It is not packed in sand bags like other statues in town. Leaving the question why he is not considered important enough to be protected. The square has some greenery, there are benches. ‘It’s in principle a great place to hang out’, says Varya, ‘but now it seems like glue to drunken old guys and other crazy outcasts. No relaxation possible for girls like me’.

A monumental building facing the square once housed, as old signs suggest, a bank but is now boarded up and full of graffiti. It does however have a working entrance on the left side. It leads us to its seller, a former bomb shelter from cold war times but now an art studio for children. It’s the home of Aza Nizi Maza.

With our team at nl12 | lab we are in the finishing stage of The March VR, an immersive experience about our relation to war. For years we’ve been collecting photographs, objects and other remnants of our violent past. Ordinary things really, stuff you can find on flea markets, family archives but also the local supermarket. From all those pieces we reconstructed new virtual realities.

With hundreds of amateur photos made just after the bombardment of the city of Rotterdam on the 14th of May 1940, objects, paintings and digital possibilities we created ruins that might give reverence to the bombings in Grozny or Gaza. By combining house plants and colonial photography we re-imagined the Dutch occupation of Indonesia. We combined old souvenirs taken from Africa and the Caribbean and objects that were stolen during colonial times and are now inside our museums that we scanned and combined with bluntly racist ‘anthropological’ photography. We created trenches with soldiers and even a ‘refugee camp’ referring to the First World War and beyond using studio photography from that period that we converted into 3D. We made a scene to discuss our zoos and world- and war museums. And we created another scene about a totalitarian state. For that I bought nearly 700 photographs at the flea market in Kharkiv. This combined with my own work from the period I was a photojournalist we turned into a 3D, virtual world where the visitor can walk around in an authoritarian state.

The March is our attempt to discuss serious matters with our surroundings in a more or less playful way. With this VR we try to open conversation about the issues we seem to walk away from.

Everyone who is prepared to dig in his personal (family) history will find black spots. During wartime our ancestors were not just victims but also perpetrators or most common, bystanders. We have to face it, there are many perpetrators to be found in our personal past and we are all at least bystanders in the present.

My own grandfather was a colonial, a skipper on a trading ship to what they called ‘The Dutch East Indies’ (Indonesia). My grandfather on my mothers side took the job as mayor of his small city during the German occupation of the Netherlands. He was a collaborator but he was also able to hide the jewish background of his wife and daughters. The great grand uncle of our composer Frieda Gustavs died on his way to the Eastern front as an SS soldier. Our writer Marieke Ornelis is working on her first novel telling the dark collaboration history of her family in Antwerp during WW2. And there’s today: our Ukrainian team member Olga Starostina has been getting live updates of ongoing war on her phone every few minutes for four years now. Together with her daughter Sasha (8) she is in The Netherlands for safety reasons. Since her arrival at our Amsterdam studio the conversations on the development of The March became far less abstract. Our ideas and intentions seemed clear when we started, but then new questions and also doubts showed up.

A lot of our conversations were about the role, competence and incompetence of my former profession: journalism. Already years ago my work as a photojournalist felt more and more problematic for me. At a certain point I decided to stop making images of people in crisis situations but to start working alongside them.

At the studio we found ways to look into the past but how to deal with the present wave of violence?
Olga told us she had been dreaming about a studio called Aza Nizi Maza for years and showed us their Facebook page. We were stunned. The art studio is famous in Ukraine. It was established in 2012 by Mykola Kolomiets and had, not too long ago, seven staff members. During the first years of Russian invasion of the Donbas region, it accommodated many refugee children from Lugansk and Donetsk. After the full scale invasion in 2022 when also Kharkiv was under attack, most staff left the city or joined the army. Mykola Kolomiets and organizer Olexiy Mikhailov were the only ones who remained. Without structural financial support they managed to keep the place afloat and welcomed all children that showed up. Some children moved on to art schools or elsewhere but a steady group remained working for years.

Two years ago Olga made contact with Mykola and Olexiy and things got into speed when I arrived in Kharkiv in early spring 2025. Inside the overcrowded studio I installed laptops and headsets and started experimenting with the children in virtual space. At the studio in Amsterdam, Olga, together with creative coder Paulina Cywoniuk, technologist Cris Mollee and composer Frieda Gustavs provided technical backing.

Sitting in between the children, I asked them to give me drawings that we turned into 3D and implemented in an improvised virtual landscape on the spot. I was surrounded by enthusiastic kids all day. The pile of drawings on the table next to me grew and grew. Little Mira (7) who had lost her father fighting at the front only weeks before, spent a real long time inside our common experimental virtual experience. While doing so we scanned her and she became a part of that experience herself. In the final scene we created, you can see her standing on a flying dragon that was created by another Aza Nizi Maza artist.

On my last day in Kharkiv, Mykola gave me a hard drive with thousands of drawings made by children at Aza Nizi Maza in the past. With that and all the input of the children I met, the nl12 team and I created the scene we named ‘Colour’. It’s an large scene in which the visitor can fly along the children’s experiences. While flying over the heads of huge monsters you’ll meet children, animals, wars and peace scenes. You can fly all the way to a spaceship. All created by the children of Aza Nizi Maza. Frieda Gustavs composed and recorded music for it. This is what I’m bringing back to Kharkiv now.

The central team at Aza Nizi Maza are teenagers. They’re close and loyal to each other. Varvara Korotchenko forms together with Khrystyna Samoilova (17), Daryna Khamakha (16), Violetta Kolmohorova (17), George Nosenko (13), Kamelia Khrystenko (15), Pelahiia Bilanchuk (15) and a few others the very heart of the studio’s daily routine. Nearly every day after school they walk in and start working. They are joined by very young children like Vanya Kononov-Rudnykevych (9), who recently had his first large solo show in a huge industrial building. His often larger than life paintings and drawings easily filled the huge room.

In the middle of the most busy room I plant my VR lab again. The reactions are joyful and lead to spontaneous shouting. After they experienced the work themselves, Varvara and Khrystyna take the lead to instruct the others, giving me the opportunity to film that process. Mykola takes a really long time to explore every detail inside the VR and then gets sick. The next day he spends even more time in the experience. When he takes off his headset he is full of words but not very clear: ‘Oh, Leo, we really need to change things!’ Before I have the opportunity to get worried, he already moves to the other room to do god-knows-what. It’s clear to me now that it’s not the VR that has to change but the plan in his head. What he saw in the VR inspired him to change something else, somewhere. He promised to inform me about it later.

I had been worried about how the final VR scene with the children’s artwork would be received. It might not contain work made by all of the children involved. We used hundreds of paintings, drawings and sketches and bringing 2D into 3D changes the nature of these images. The children and teenagers do not seem to mind – or even notice – at all. They see everything as their work, their community work. What matters most to them is what brings them together.

‘When you came to the studio for the first time, it was my first experience in VR’, says Daryna, ‘I was amazed about the possibilities. This time I was not expecting much more but it really surprised me. I recognize our works and like what you’ve done with them. They look like hope among scary, strange and not-understandable things. It’s like our art is put in the jar, you see it in vacuum, without explanation. It’s like a creepy game where you just need to be watching’.

While the children all get a chance to experience their virtual world, I take time to observe the ongoing developments at the studio. All children have a personalized working relationship with Mykola Kolomiets. With some it leads to long complex discussions with others to absurd humor. He encourages them all to embrace their freedom and think and work big. Larger than their own bodies. They are provided with unlimited amounts of paper and paint but waste none. Mykola runs around the place for hours putting everybody to work and making them all feel at home. While talking he keeps moving, he can still be talking to you when he is in another room.

Mykola encourages the children to think via their actions. They join him in a sometimes hard to follow process. While developing conceptual ideas Mykola and the children talk, joke, construct, de-construct and start over again. Then, when the framework is done, others get involved for details and next steps.

Although Mykola Kolomiets had a strong career as an individual fine artist and musician in the past he reached his real heights while working with children. ‘Children have the capacity to ignore obstacles and are able to think and act completely free’, he says. ‘Any idea gets richer when you put it via children’s brains and actions. I really think that there should be no walls between adult and children’s art. We need each other.’

An important part of the studio life are the numerous children with special needs. Society puts harsh labels on them like ‘autism’ and ‘down syndrome’. At the studio everybody is considered a full member of the artistic team. Whatever their contribution to the projects could be, it will be embraced with love and attention. Among the special people is Vlad Pohrebnoi, he is one of the most loyal members of the artistic team and extremely talented. Vlad has his own channels on Telegram and Instagram and is one of the oldest at 22. He has a very special relationship with Mykola who takes care that there is always a quiet spot for Vlad to work. When there is still too much noise around, his noise canceling headphone comes in handy.

In the corridors I speak with the mothers of special needs children, some of them bring their laptops to do their work like Iryna Pavliuchenko who is a programmer. When I give her a hug after not seeing her for a year and ask: ‘how are things?’ her always shining face turns dark for a few seconds. ‘Where to start…’, she says.

Aza Nizi Maza produces multiple exhibition projects that can be seen all over Ukraine and beyond. These often enormous combined artworks made by multiple artists have many layers and even more details. You can spend hours watching and interpreting them.

The work schedule structure is simple: the work gets done by the children who show up. Khrystyna, Daryna and Violetta are therefore almost always present. Every day during the hours the studio is open, they walk in and get to work. I ask Khrystyna, who is a quiet central figure, respected by all and seen as one of their greatest talents, how she feels about others painting over her work when she’s absent, she says: ‘frustrating at first sight but I’m fine with it when it gets interesting and that is often the case. I really enjoy working as part of a team. It’s great because we can discuss the details and other stuff with the other project members right as we’re working. Sometimes I might forget something or simply don’t know how to do it, but Daryna or Violetta, for example, do know, so I can confidently hand the task over to them. If I fall ill or can’t come in, I can trust the girls and leave my responsibilities with them. Although sometimes I do worry that someone might not manage it as well and things won’t go as they should, that rarely happens, as everyone has already honed their skills’.

When I ask them about their relation to art, excitement fills the room: ‘Sometimes I spend more time at the studio than at home’, says Daryna. ‘You know, for me art is something unreal, something normal and surreal. Something that includes everything and nothing in it. I love art but sometimes it’s too complicated. Sometimes it’s just too much’.

‘Art is there for all of us’, says Khrystyna. It’s a way of expressing what you cannot put into words. Thoughts that you cannot articulate can always be depicted. Art also reflects people’s identity, as it is through art that many people come to know a culture’. Then she says: ‘Art has many boundaries, but the most important thing is that they are all open’. Violetta joins in: ‘For me art is life. It’s about living in the moment, because I don’t know what tomorrow will bring.’

In recent weeks everything in the large central room at Aza Nizi Maza turned into 3D. Not only are all the walls filled with 3D paintings in progress, the room is also full with statues of animals, people, masks, plants and houses. The team is creating scenery for a puppet theatre. The developing story is based on the lives of the Grimm brothers. It’s the third large Aza Nizi Maza project this year.

‘At the moment, we’re working with sculptures’, Violetta says’. We’re creating sets for a theatre production, and here it’s essential to understand how these forms will interact spatially. When we were just starting out, we spent ages folding and tearing paper, exploring what we could do. And right now, we’re doing things we don’t know how to do properly. It’s a new format for us’.

The procedure Violetta is talking about sounds very familiar to me. Every VR project we have created in our studio in Amsterdam started with a dive into the unknown. Trial and error, there is no other way. The more we get to know each other, here in this cellar in Kharkiv, the more common grounds appear. Maybe our technologies differ, we think and work in a similar way so there is a good reason we spent so much time talking about 2D vs 3D.

Violetta: ‘Take a leaf, for example: it may seem flat, but it has veins, and people still perceive it as something three-dimensional. The brain sort of automatically constructs a 3D model from the two-dimensional data. For me, two-dimensionality is more of a mathematical structure. VR is a cool way to exaggerate volume and also to explore small details of the terrain’.

Everyone at the studio seems a bit exhausted, the team just presented their last huge project: a show for the Khanenko Museum in Kyiv. They created a 2,5 meter high and 23 meter long panorama that reflects on the ‘Los Disparates’ etchings by Francisco Goya. Last year the museum had discovered a copy of it in its own archive. The Aza Nizi Maza team was invited to create a re-interpretation. They decided collectively to compose a dream about the coming-of-age of the fictional teenager Frantsyska Talán. It is presented in a huge continuous circle with an opening for the public to get in.

The main narrative follows this young woman who has dreams and at some point decides to record them. Everything around her is dominated by her fear of the future.

‘We spent a lot of time poring over the engravings, sharing our experiences and reactions to what we saw, Khrystyna says. ‘ It was on this basis that the framework of the project was built. A lot of emotions were released whilst working on this project and at the exhibition itself. During the opening there was a real buzz of excitement, with lots of people, cameras and journalists. Everyone was keen to chat to us and ask about the project and what it was all about.’

The team put their own dreams-experiences into the project. ‘I’m walking through a run-down market’, says Violetta. ‘The stalls were closed and lots of different signs were swaying. The weather was absolutely dreadful, a strong wind as if a hurricane were about to hit. Birds were flying very low and I can see how the birds – mostly blue ones – start flying in circles and these circles gradually gather into a sphere of rings. Then the birds flapped their wings, but remained in the same spot in the air. I felt as though this sphere, as if it was looking at me from within. It resembled a cherub, and then it all contracted and exploded. I started to run, but all around me, and sometimes towards me, already dead birds were falling’.

‘Okay, I’ll tell you my dream’, Daryna says. ‘It’s about an elderly communist woman in a wheelchair. So in that dream I was in my flat with Khrystyna and Violetta. I live on the 11th floor and my window looks out at the roof of another house’s roof. Wait! It matters! I looked at the clock and thought that it was really late and Khrystyna and Violetta should go home. When I told them the time Khrystyna and Violetta ran away. I turned my face to the roof of the other house and I saw soldiers. They had guns and communist hats on their heads. Their leader was an elderly communist woman in a wheelchair. I was scared. One of them turned towards me and I ran away to my kitchen where my mother was with Khrystyna and Violetta. Violetta had a handprint on her leg.’

Khrystyna takes over: ‘I’m about six years old and heading to our storeroom, which is to the right of the door leading into the room. The storeroom was cluttered with old things like wheels and old televisions. Once inside, I see a small door beneath the window. I go through it and find myself in a large gym. It’s decorated in red and yellow. At the end of this gym there is a box of dolls (rather silly ones). I play with them and wake up back in bed. This dream goes on for about a week. Then, a few months later, I have the dream again in exactly the same sequence but the final part is different: as I enter the storeroom I see a swing and – through the window in the courtyard – a girl on a similar swing. We are swinging together. Me in the room and her in the courtyard’.

‘I had another dream from the beginning of the war’, Daryna says. ‘Me and my friend were near my house when Russian soldiers came to Kharkiv. We ran to my house and she didn’t have time to come into my flat and they killed her. So it’s a little bit of a sad dream’.

But wait!, says Khrystyna, ‘There is another story behind this project. This one is from real life. When my cousin Nastya came to visit, we were sitting down to dinner. She showed us a bottle containing the skeleton of a tiny frog. When I was telling about it at the studio, we decided to use the frog’s skeleton as one of our storylines.’

The exhibition at the Khanenko Museum opened just a few weeks ago and became an instant success. I can see it’s a big thing on my Instagram feed. It’s filled with pictures made by visitors from all sides of my Ukrainian network. The work is incredibly impressive, it has real museum quality. Hard to believe it’s made by a bunch of teenagers supported by very young children and some ‘special’ children with disabilities like not being able to speak.

We discuss whether an artwork as this could work outside Ukraine. Khrystyna, Violetta, Daryna and the others have doubts. ‘The visitors in Kyiv are Ukrainians’, says Daryna. ‘When it comes to foreign people, it wouldn’t work if they don’t have this experience or their relatives have this experience. I’m not talking about war experience specifically. Ukrainians for ages had fought for their lives, their culture and fortunately not a big amount of nations know how that feels.’

Of course I can argue with Daryna and her friends about their knowledge of experiences of other people in other countries, but I won’t. I’m intrigued by their sense of necessity to re-evaluate, interpret and reconstruct storytelling and identity. I’m impressed by their use of freedom and imagination to do so. It is as Khrystyna said before. Their borders are open. Their ideas, dreams and images help to shape a renewed Ukrainian identity and create an impressive new wave inside European art. For me, an outsider, it’s simply amazing to see how important the role of the children and young adults at Aza Nizi Maza studio is in that process. There’s a heavy weight on their shoulders.

So where do we go from here? So yes, we would love to develop more immersive art together with the new generation in Ukraine and we are of course making plans to do so. In The Netherlands we are therefore building a new coalition including museums, art institutions and art academies to find steady grounds to move forward.