Pavel Brăila

Vera Means Belief (2022)
​Fragile Podil (2018)

Pavel Brăila, Vera Means Belief (2022), film still, Courtesy of the artist

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Moldova is one of the nearest transit hubs for people fleeing Southern Ukraine and the area around Odesa. From the first days of the war, artist Pavel Brăila has been volunteering at a refugee camp in the village of Palanca next to the Ukrainian border. It was here that he encountered the 72-year-old pensioner Vera Derevianko from the East Ukrainian town of Pryluky. For months, she has refused to leave the camp despite many offers of better accommodation, explaining that she wants to be as close as possible to home. Brăila’s work-in-progress focuses on Derevianko’s indefatigable character, her relationships with people in the camp, and her poetry, which she writes in the Ukrainian-Russian creole of Surzhyk. These poems are full of chilling images of loss and destruction, but also full of hope and a love for life—all of which Derevianko comes to embody in Brăila’s film. This new work is complemented by an older one made in Kyiv in 2018. A ribbon flies in the wind over the historic neighborhood of Podil, heavily damaged at the beginning of the war by nightly Russian missile barrages and shown here in all its fragile beauty.


Pavel Brăila (1971, Chişinău, Moldova) is an artist and filmmaker. His work addresses the fragile economies of post-Soviet realities in a mix of conceptual performance and experimental film. Brăila has participated in numerous exhibitions, including at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam; the Tate Gallery, London; the Renaissance Society, Chicago; Kölnischer Kunstverein; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Documenta 11 and Documenta 14, Kassel (and Athens); and Manifesta 10, St. Petersburg.

Vera Means Belief (2022)
HD video, work in progress, 12 min.

Director: Pavel Brăila
Camera: Vladislav Hîncu
Editing: Marin Chirică

Supported by ERSTE Foundation, Kontakt Collection


Fragile Podil (2018)
HD video, 6 min.

Director: Pavel Brăila

Produced in Kyiv during a residency organized by CSM / Foundation Center for Contemporary Art, in the project 4 Days on the Road (September 2018)