KURENIVKAOn the playa
For a theme camp, the camp itself is the art. But every few years Kurenivka also carried something out onto the open playa. These are the pieces that stood in the dust.
Female Ritual
Slava Gudenok
A life-size clay figure of a pregnant woman, sculpted in three days in camp and fired on the playa near the Man before Burn Night.
AI.TLants
Oleksandra Stepanenko and team
Atlantes about artificial intelligence, years before everyone was talking about it, welded from metal on the playa.
Sorry
Oleksiy Sai
Glowing pixel letters laid flat on the playa in the year Burning Man lost its founder.
The Hedgehog Temple
Yaroslav Korets and Oleksandr Slobodianiuk
A memorial built from anti-tank hedgehogs, for the Ukrainians who will never make it to Burning Man because the war took them.
How Much Is Life?
Yaroslav Korets with Dmytro Pavlenko
A replica of a well, drawn from the 1961 Kurenivka mudslide and Babyn Yar. By day a silent marker; at night an animation inside.
Blue Bull
After Maria Prymachenko · Rostyslav Dudchenko
A Prymachenko beast in blue fur, two storeys high, with a stage on its back.
Merman
Andrii Krapyvchenko, with engineer Oleksii Tronchuk
Selected for a Burning Man Honorarium for 2020, stopped by the pandemic and then the war, built in Kyiv anyway, and finally raised on the playa by Kurenivka in 2025.
Point of Unity
Mykola Kabluka
A mirrored circle that roots the sky to the desert floor. The unofficial chapel of Burning Man 2025, home to more than twenty weddings.
Lightning Tower
Pepemaniak (Federico Ceruso)
A ten-metre neon totem of hand-blown glass, cut by jagged lines of lightning. The only Italian Honorarium of 2025, built from inside a Ukrainian camp.