Fountain of Exhaustion. ACQUA ALTA | Pavel Makov

The book of the National Pavilion of Ukraine at the 59th Venice Biennale tells about the history, contexts and interpretations of Pavlo Makov's work "Fountain of Exhaustion". In 2022, at the Arsenale di Venezia, the fountain worked for the first time as an active art object, with water fed inside, although it was conceived by the artist back in 1995 in Kharkiv, a large city in eastern Ukraine.

The book presents a detailed chronology of the "Fountain of Exhaustion" for the years 1995-2022, collected archival materials that illustrate the transformation of the work of art over twenty-five years, as well as texts by various authors - about Makov's practices, about the temporal and spatial connotations of "The Fountain of Exhaustion" , about water, rivers and canals, flooding and devastation, personal landscapes and global issues of today.

Among the authors of the texts: the curators of the Ukrainian pavilion — Borys Filonenko, Lizaveta Herman and Maria Lanko, the poet Bess Joselow, the artist Vlada Ralko, the artist Stanislav Turina, the philosopher Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, the poet Serhiy Zhadan, the writer Taras Prokhasko, as well as Pavlo Makov himself.