Black Cloud (2025), a Ukrainian installation at the Burning Man festival in Nevada warning of dark times ahead for the entire world, is being rebuilt after it was blown away by a hurricane-force dust storm on 24 August.
The storm on the festival’s opening day in the Black Rock Desert coincided with Ukrainian Independence Day, adding another metaphoric layer to the 100ft-tall, eight-ton inflatable sculpture by the artist Oleksiy Sai, which was funded by private donors from Ukraine and the US. It is composed of 45 interconnected forms filled with 90,000 cubic feet of air. Twenty strobe lights were mounted to flash like lightening around the structure, set to a soundscape of missiles, sirens and explosions merged into a composition by the war veteran and musician Anatoly Tapolsky, known as DJ Tapolsky.
The installation premiered in Kyiv in early June, with an edited soundscape to avoid traumatising residents. Video performances were filmed to accompany the installation as it travels around the world, including a reading of a Crimean Tatar poem against tyranny that was suppressed in Soviet times.
“I simply see something appearing on the horizon and have a certain freedom to engage with what looms there because I am independent and can dedicate myself to things that may not seem important at first glance,” Sai tells The Art Newspaper. “That is the essence of an artist’s work—to work on what will become significant a little later.” He adds that “sometimes reality overtakes me, rather than the other way around”.
DJ Tapolsky was scheduled to perform at Burning Man on Thursday despite slipping and breaking his leg there due to slickness caused by rain after the dust storm.
Oleksiy Sai's Black Cloud (2025) at Burning Man before it was destroyed by a dust storm on 24 August Photo by Dnytro Pochkun
Vitaliy Deynega, the general producer of Black Cloud who has been involved in Ukraine’s defence since Russia first invaded in 2014 and served in 2023 as Ukraine’s deputy minister of defence for digital transformation, described the sculpture’s meaning and destruction in several Facebook posts, comparing the storm to the first moments of Russia’s full-scale invasion. He is the founder of Ukrainian Witness, which uses photos, videos and cultural projects to document the war and tell its story globally.
Speaking with The Art Newspaper via satellite from the Black Cloud camp at Burning Man, Deynega says that “a very strong and very sudden wind” came with only a 15-minute warning and broke the structure in half. “It felt like one of your relatives suddenly died.”
Many who managed to see Black Cloud before the storm were “coming and saying thank you for the message, because a lot of people across the world are feeling that we are on the very edge of something which can happen, and we need to avoid it”, Deynega says. “It’s not a Ukrainian conflict, it’s already a global conflict on Ukrainian ground.” He adds: “Art is the best message possible. It resonates with people’s emotions and with some experiences everyone has. It’s much better than any kind of news that, for example, something bad happened in Ukraine. Everyone already knows that we have a war, but I want the world to see Ukraine as a country that can make beauty and can make art and that’s why we’re surviving." Black Cloud is the same team’s third installation at Burning Man, following Phoenix in 2023 and I’m Fine in 2024.
Oksana Markarova, Ukraine’s outgoing ambassador to the US, tells The Art Newspaper that Black Cloud was intended “as a reminder of unseen dangers hanging over all of us”. She adds: “We cannot control nature and storms, but together with our partners and friends we do have the power to end Russian aggression and secure a just and lasting peace.”
The Ukrainian Institute had been planning to take Black Cloud on a European tour following Burning Man, with support of Ukraine’s ministry of foreign affairs. “It’s important to bring this beautiful and powerful work to people in Europe, where Russia’s brutal genocidal war is happening as we speak,” says Tetyana Filevska, the institute’s creative director.
Early on Thursday (28 August), less than two weeks after a summit in Alaska between Russian President Vladimir Putin and US President Donald Trump—who claimed he could broker a peace deal with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky—Russia bombarded Kyiv, killing at least 21 people.
