Oleksiy Sai on Excel-Art, War, and ‘I’m Fine’ at Burning Man

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/11/24

Oleksiy Sai (born 1975, Kyiv) is a Ukrainian contemporary artist whose practice spans digital graphics, installation, and socially engaged projects. Trained at the Kyiv College of Arts and Industries and the National Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture, he is represented by Voloshyn Gallery (Kyiv/Miami). Sai pioneered “Excel-Art,” repurposing spreadsheet software as a visual language beginning in the mid-2000s. Since Russia’s war against Ukraine, his work has turned to witness and memory, including the “Bombed” series (2014– ). In 2024 he co-created I’m Fine at Burning Man from war-damaged street materials; in 2025 he presented Black Cloud, an immersive warning piece. 

Sai speaks under an active air-raid alert about making art from ordinary tools and extraordinary times. Known for Excel-Art—images built entirely in spreadsheets—Sai pivots from corporate critique to conflict witness. He’s represented by Voloshyn Gallery (Kyiv/Miami). In 2024 he realized “I’m Fine,” a 32-meter-long, 7-meter-high Burning Man installation assembled from bullet-scarred street materials to convey war’s scale, produced with allies including Vitaliy Deynega. Deynega founded Come Back Alive, Ukraine’s major military-support nonprofit. Sai also discusses “Black Cloud,” large-scale public work, and why contemporary art’s “language of experience” can carry truth further than information alone.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Today, we’re with Oleksiy Sai, a Ukrainian contemporary artist whose practice spans digital graphics, installation, and socially engaged projects. Trained in Kyiv, he is represented by Voloshyn Gallery, which operates in Kyiv and has a space in Miami. Is the air raid alarm still going for the interview now?

Oleksiy Sai: We are under a state of alarm. There’s some danger. But honestly, we do nothing about these things. Sometimes when the bombing is too heavy, we move to the part of the apartment with thicker walls. That’s it. We never run to subway stations or shelters. 

Jacobsen: When I was in Dnipro, I started sitting in the hotel bathtub. It works. It’s practical. Some people just say, “Either I’m going to die, or I’m going to have a good night’s sleep and stay in bed anyway.”

Sai: It can protect you from broken windows. The most dangerous thing is the broken glass if a missile hits nearby. If it hits you directly, you’re done. 

Jacobsen: Some of these Iskander missiles are short-range ballistic or cruise missiles with heavy warheads; their effects can extend hundreds of meters depending on the warhead type and target. I was there when Poltava happened. More than fifty people died and over three hundred were injured.

We heard about it in the morning and were there within a few hours. 

Sai: I remember it well. I used to make videos from the war—very raw, like video art for politicians—and I have a lot of that material.

Jacobsen: So, why did Excel stop being a tool and become a medium—potentially in a McLuhan sense?

Sai: I can show you some pictures from Excel. I have some of them. They’re made entirely in Excel. I worked in an advertising agency to make a living in the ’90s and early 2000s. I was surprised by how strange the relationships between people were in offices. To me, it was a comedy. In our post-Soviet society, we were building work relations in business from scratch. It was funny.

I started making pictures in Excel because I thought that “bad” pictures made from an everyday office tool would connect to the medium people use daily. They would understand. And it worked. I began doing it out of irony.

Jacobsen: Sometimes the most effective construction material is irony—it’s very robust construction materials.

Sai: Yes. But soon I realized it wasn’t a criticism. It was simply a poor tool to make pictures but a good one to make people understand what they do in this program. People looked at the pictures—flowers, for example—and said, “Horror, horror.” That reaction was good for me. I still make Excel pictures because it’s fun for me to work this way. I love working with materials and tools that do not offer comfort.

Jacobsen: You were born and raised in the Soviet Union. What do you remember from that time?

Sai: I was born and raised in the Soviet Union, and I remember feeling that I wasn’t a part of it. That sense stayed with me for the first years of my life.

I remember the first revolution in 1991. I went to the meetings. I was a teenager, but I was absolutely happy that the Soviet Union was about to collapse. Then we were really outside the control of the state—most people were. And maybe that gap gave us something else: self-confidence. It felt like the state wasn’t something above us anymore; it was us. We could control it. That’s how we made these revolutions happen—because the state insulted our dignity, and we started to act.

It was violent, it was hard. Those months in the winter of 2013–2014, during what we call the Revolution of Dignity, were very difficult. You worked every day on the frozen streets. It wasn’t fun at all, but it was necessary. We never believed that Russia would go this far. We knew Russia was an enemy, but we didn’t believe it would start a full invasion. It was truly unexpected. I was very upset and wanted to help somehow.

I never had the idea to go into the army, but I volunteered. I did what I could to help, and my wife also volunteered. We were part of a community that was actively doing something about it. We didn’t serve in the army, but we contributed in other ways.

So the full-scale invasion was unexpected, but the years leading up to it were not. The invasion was unexpected, but the tension wasn’t. We just continued doing something useful. I had the advantage of being independent, so I could decide what to do myself. Sometimes I succeeded. I made things that had an impact.

Jacobsen: I grew up in a community of artists in a small town, and I think artists often share that feeling you described earlier—being apart from the mainstream, no matter the country. That seems universal. Hoping for the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, or later for dignity and independence for Ukraine during an unexpected war—both carry that same sense of striving for freedom. Even within the artist community, you seem to embody that independence. How would you describe the inspiration for I’m Fine?

Sai: I can’t really call it inspiration. It’s more of a result. We made it because we thought it was necessary. My friend Vitaliy Deynega—perhaps you’ve heard of him—founded Povernys’ Zhyvym (Come Back Alive), the largest charity foundation in Ukraine that has supported the army since 2014.

He—my friend Vitaliy Deynega—was the one who founded it. I’ve helped him since 2014, since the beginning of the war. One day, in 2023, he came to my studio and said, “Stop making these posters and doing the daily routine. Let’s make something big.”

During the first half-year of the full-scale invasion, I made whatever people asked me to make—posters for demonstrations, a lot of work. It went viral. It worked, but it wasn’t art. It was communication.

Both of us had been to Burning Man separately, but we knew the culture and the community. He said we needed to communicate with that audience, because it could spread information about Ukraine worldwide. So, we made one sculpture—it was called Phoenix. The next year, we decided to make I’m Fine. It was the result of thinking about what we could say—how we could communicate what was happening.

It was strange that they accepted it, because it’s so political and, in a way, ugly. But it works. From a distance, it looks funny; up close, it’s not funny at all. When you understand what it’s made of, you see the scale of the war. Because war in the news often looks distant—you can’t feel it. We wanted to make people see what we see, that the destruction is massive.

We gathered materials with help from the military. They gave us signs and debris from zones where nobody lives now—places under constant shelling. They sent us city signs from occupied territories, old and damaged. I wanted to show that this war is unimaginably big—bigger than people can imagine from the outside.

When you come close, you see only fragments—thirty meters of shredded metal, torn by bullets. People cried when they saw it. I can’t say it was something I wanted to make, but when I drew the sketch, I realized it would be expensive, difficult, and necessary. It had to be made. It’s not self-expression; it’s an expression of what we live through. For me, it’s communication more than art. But it worked.

Jacobsen: And people don’t always realize—you don’t need to go very far. You don’t need to be on the front line. You can walk through many cities for a day and see babushkas walking around, and then suddenly see a soldier with a bandaged arm, a missing hand. It’s very immediate for a lot of people. A significant minority of Ukrainians have at least one family member in the army, right?

Sai: Yes, that’s true. Even if not on the front line, they’re serving somewhere—logistics, leadership, technical work. Everyone does their part. It’s absolutely normal for men to serve now. We do have problems with recruiting, but the number of people in the army is still not large enough.

The chances of being called to the military are quite high. I’m okay with that. I’m confident. If I’m called, I will go. I don’t know how successful I’ll be in the army, but I’ll do my best.

Jacobsen: Do you think the language of expression has changed as the war has progressed, or has there been a consistent through line?

Sai: What I’ve realized during this full-scale invasion is that the language of contemporary art is very efficient. It gives you experience—something deeper than information. It’s not always clear for every viewer, but it can create a more complex understanding.

Take I’m Fine, for example. Through it, you can sense the scale of destruction, or from Alevtina’s paintings, you can feel the hypocrisy and lies of the Russian narrative. You can read an article and think, “Okay, now I know,” but when you see her small, chaotic images, you realize how frank they are. They truly convey what she thinks and feels. That’s what I aim for too—to be as clear and as imaginative as possible.

Jacobsen: Would you ever consider collaborating with people who aren’t artists—say, those who’ve been to the front lines? To convey their psychological landscape, maybe for an international audience, like through the Kyiv Miami Gallery or Burning Man—but also domestically, or even regionally, like in Lithuania or France?

Sai: We already have many artists in the army—friends of mine who are serving now. Our army is full of different people. They’re not professional soldiers; they’re ordinary people like us. There’s no real divide between military and civilian life anymore, except that they’re extremely tired, and they suffer deeply. Even those who aren’t on the front line—it’s still them. It’s still us. The army is not a good place to spend years, but it’s necessary.

I’ve worked with people in the army, and they’re not very different from anyone else. In fact, they often work better—they understand they need to act, to do something meaningful. Sometimes they’re even more collaborative. But I can’t really divide people into “civilian” and “military” anymore. It’s all very mixed now.

There are so many volunteers—it’s like a whole class of people living in between. And it’s not always peaceful work. When you do something for a soldier, you’re more or less involved yourself, even internally. I’m not sure if that fully answers your question.

Jacobsen: Here’s what I was getting at—maybe this is more precise. Do you feel lucky as an artist, to have the talent and outlet to express yourself, compared to those who might not have that?

Sai: No, I don’t feel lucky. I feel obliged to do this. I don’t think it’s a good time or place to live, but I want to make this place better. That’s what drives me. I don’t feel lucky, and I won’t use the results of these war years as any kind of advantage later. No. I just try to do whatever helps others—and myself—in this situation. That’s how it is.

Jacobsen: What’s your current big project that readers should know about?

Sai: The last one was another sculpture we made for Burning Man. It was called The Black Cloud—a warning piece, also about thirty meters wide. It was destroyed by the wind.

After that, we made another installation on the same spot, using the words “No Fate,” like Sarah Connor wrote in the Terminator movie. We used pieces of fabric, but then a huge storm hit. It was unexpectedly dangerous—we were lucky that all 70,000 people in Black Rock City stayed alive. Some were injured, and there was damage, but for that many people, it was okay.

The storm was massive. Our sculpture was destroyed, and now I’m just trying to return to routine work. I’ve built a small gizmo—it lets me draw using a screwdriver. Now I’m trying to do some simple, even stupid things—just to feel a bit of normal life again.

Jacobsen: Excellent. Enjoy the rest of your day, it was nice to meet you, and discuss your work.

Sai: Thank you. Bye-bye.

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