Valerie Karpan

Artist and researcher

Valerie Karpan is an artist, researcher and curator, from Kyiv. Her main research areas are participatory art, colonial, and decolonial discourses in the context of eastern European studies, memory representation and commemoration, and participatory mapping. She is the co-founder of the NGO Cultural Geographies and its Children’s Geographies initiative. Since 2018, she has been a participant in the Variable Name art group. She was a resident within the Gaude Polonia scholarship of Poland’s ministry of culture and national heritage. She participated in the Curatorial Platform at the PinchukArtCentre (2020); and took part in residencies at the WRO Art Centre in Wrocław, Poland (2019), and the Ukrainian Calling program in Frankfurt (Oder), Germany (2021). She was the 2022 Art Prospect Fellow, in New York, dedicated to researching socially engaged practices with US colleagues. She was nominated for the 2025 PinchukArtCentre Prize.