Young, Wild and Full of ***: Sofiya Loriashvili Takes Over a Former Market in Lviv
On October 31, Tovary Gallery in Lviv opened Young, wild and full of ***, a solo exhibition by Paris-based Ukrainian photographer Sofiya Loriashvili. Through intimate, unfiltered photography, the show looks at how Ukrainians live through the full-scale war: their sexuality, vulnerability, anxiety and hunger for freedom in a reality that refuses to promise a next summer.The title borrows a familiar phrase and deliberately leaves it unfinished. In Loriashvili’s gaze, Ukrainian youth, herself included, becomes a list of possibilities: full of desire, loyalty, fear, determination, creativity, resilience, style, stupidity. Nothing is resolved into a single answer. Growing up in a country where the future has been interrupted again and again, she suggests, produces a particular relationship to the present. To be anxious and euphoric, terrified and horny, exhausted and completely alive at once is not a contradiction here, it is a daily condition. The nudity and explicitness of the work belong to that condition. They are inseparable from the question of how young people keep inhabiting their bodies, desires and relationships while danger stays close.
At the same time, the exhibition resists the idea that this generation lives on another planet. Raving, flirting, dressing up, getting high, looking bored, looking beautiful, looking for ways to help the country: the gestures are recognizable, and so is the music. Loriashvili also points to the economy of the outside gaze, in which Ukraine becomes interesting when it looks sufficiently exotic, and excess is easy to read as spectacle. For her, the excess is the point. The body is where the present can still be experienced directly.
The photographs do not keep these worlds apart. Real soldiers, explosions and guns appear in the same visual field as bare skin, club nights and tenderness, and the frame makes no effort to sort them into separate registers. This is the new morality of the war that the outside world rarely sees: a place where desire and violence share the same air, where a body in uniform and a body undressed can belong to the same generation, sometimes to the same person. The images ask what it means to be turned on and afraid at once, and who gets to judge a young person for wanting to feel something when the alternative is numbness.
Born in Kyiv in 1999 and a graduate of Gobelins School of Photography, Loriashvili works between documentary and intimate photography, treating her practice as a personal visual diary that moves between Ukraine and France. Her focus on youth subcultures, sexuality and marginalized experience met censorship early on, which pushed her toward the photobook as a space without limits. Her titles include My Last Voyage in This Fucking World (2022), ICI et LA, My Book (2024) and Only You and Me (2025, with Fisheye). Her work has appeared in Dazed, i-D, VICE and Bird in Flight.
The show is hosted by Tovary Gallery (Товари з Європи), an artist-run space founded in 2024 by Anastasiia Shergina and Ihor Tymoshchuk. It occupies a former market in Lviv’s Pidzamche district and works with experimental, site-specific practices at the meeting point of contemporary art, public space, marginalized communities and formal institutions.
Curators: Ihort Tymoshchuk, Anastasiia Shergina
Venue: Tovary Gallery, 173 Mekhanichna Street, Lviv
Instagram: @tovary.gallery
Words: Ihort Tymoshchuk