Kyiv Whale

Turn left at the main fountain at VDNH, walk until the long building ends, and you'll see the whale hanging in the air above you. It's 12 metres long, weighs around 750 kilograms, and sits on six metal pillars over the Soviet-era buildings below.

Come after sunset if you can. It's lit at night and looks considerably better than it does in daylight.

What It's Made Of

Every panel on the frame is recycled plastic, and all of it came out of Kyiv. Bottles were collected over six months for the project, with more than 2,000 people taking part - students, activists and schools among them - gathering plastic waste from the city's parks and rivers. That waste was then processed into the panels that make up the whale's body.

The sculpture was installed on 15 September 2021 as an ecological symbol for the city, and it's interactive, connected to the Ecosystem of Kyiv project.

Why It's There

The artist, Vladislav Korshunov, built it to make a point about how much plastic waste the city produces and where it ends up. He has said the aim was to get people recycling, and children in particular into green habits and thinking about waste.

Knowing how it was made is what makes it worth the walk. Without that it's a large sculpture of a whale in an odd place; with it, you're looking at six months of the city's rubbish, reassembled and hung in the air.

Korshunov previously worked in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, and has plans for further sculptures in other cities. If you collect this sort of thing, Landscape Alley in the Upper Town is the other part of the city given over to it.

It's a ten minute stop rather than a destination, so pair it with the rest of VDNH rather than making a special trip. The monobank cat on the side of pavilion 9 is the obvious other half of the walk, and it's how the pavilion came to be called KYT in the first place.