KURENIVKA Apply · 2027
Merman, a giant slatted-wood figure emerging from the playa, one hand raised, under a pale sky. Photo: Mark Fromson

Art · 2025 · Burning Man Honorarium Art

Merman

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.

Merman was selected for a Black Rock City Honorarium grant for 2020. He was meant to rise in the desert that summer. Then the world froze: the pandemic shut everything down. And then came the war.

Burning Man received almost 750 letters of intent that year and funded about seventy. Its art team called Merman one of the most original takes on the Multiverse theme: a human figure swimming up out of the playa, a hint that other realities may be layered over our own. A man who swims, its makers said, chooses every second whether to sink or keep swimming.

The team stayed and built him anyway, from steel and plywood, and from smoke, grief and stubborn love. In July 2021 Merman stood in the heart of Kyiv, by the People's Friendship Arch and then at the River Port: twelve metres tall, 288 wooden blocks on eight steel rods. Later he stood under air-raid sirens, beside shelters, among people who kept on living.

In 2025 he finally reached the desert. Its makers could not travel, so members of Kurenivka, working as the Kurenivka Build Crew, assembled the sculpture in Black Rock City, with Mitya Zinoviev leading construction and logistics: a collective act of care and persistence.

We are built to swim, even through fire. Not just a sculpture, but a witness, and a creature that refused to sink.

Read the 2025 chapter →

In their words

Voices

“Merman is made of thousands of parts, nearly three hundred pieces of plywood alone, on a steel frame.”

Oleksii Tronchuk Engineer of Merman NV, 2025 · translated from Ukrainian

Photographs

Merman rising out of the playa under storm clouds and sunbeamsMerman in the foreground with Blue Bull parked in the distanceMerman at night lit in pink and blue, city lights along the horizon

Credits

Concept and artist
Andrii Krapyvchenko
Engineer
Oleksii Tronchuk
Welder
Viacheslav Gudenok
Painter
Vladyslava Tronchuk
Project manager
Maria Popova
Construction & logistics, 2025
Mitya Zinoviev
Assembly in Black Rock City
The Kurenivka Build Crew
Support
The Ukrainian Burners community and the Wonder Workshop team

11 mentions

In the press