Art Communities at Risk: On Ukraine

Art in Ukraine Between Identity Construction and Anti-Colonial Resistance, 2024

Representative of a generation of contemporary Ukrainian artists, activists, and a cohort of academic scholars untainted by the trauma of imperialist ideology, freed of entrenched Russian narratives, and absent of the slightest nostalgia for a bygone Soviet era, this volume of essays offers fresh perspectives on the texture of a population and its culture breaking out of the clutches of colonization. Chronicling artistic events from the time of the dissolution of the USSR through the Orange ( ) and Euromaidan (2014) Revolutions to today's persistent criminal assault of Russia on Ukraine, the contributions give rise to a new, inclusive, way of thinking about the history of contemporary art by exposing a society transformed by the extraordinary circumstances of postcoloniality and war.

TEXTE ZUR KUNST, 2022

War and art in Ukraine, February-April 2022

2024

This edited volume traces the development of art practices in Ukraine from the 2004 Orange Revolution, through the 2013–2014 Revolution of Dignity, to the ongoing Russian war of aggression. Contributors explore how transformations of identity, the emergence of participatory democracy, relevant changes to cultural institutions, and the realization of the necessity of decolonial release have influenced the focus and themes of contemporary art practices in Ukraine. The chapters analyze such important topics as the postcolonial retrieval of the past, the deconstruction of post-Soviet visualities, representations of violence and atrocities in the ongoing Russian war against Ukraine, and the notion of art as a mechanism of civic resistance and identity-building. The book will be of interest to scholars of art history, Eastern European studies, cultural studies, decolonial studies, and postcolonial studies.

2020, At the Front Line. Ukrainian Art, 2013-2019/ La línea del frente. El arte ucraniano, 2013-2019, 2020

The catalog of the exhibition “At the Front Line. Ukrainian Art, 2013-2019” speaks about the turbulent political and social situation in Ukraine of the last seven years, such as the Revolution of Dignity, the annexation of Crimea, and the war with Russia. It focuses on the materials of the Ukrainian artists’ exhibition at the National Museum of Cultures in Mexico City from September 2019 to February 2020. This exhibition was part of a larger interdisciplinary project realized in Mexico City that also included a series of panel discussions with the participation of Ukrainian, Mexican, and British researchers and artists at the Museum of Memory and Tolerance and eight documentary screenings at the National Cineteca. This trilingual publication (English-Spanish-Ukrainian) documents the first large-scale project in Latin America which looked at the contemporary Ukrainian art scene and the situation in the country. The exhibition was further presented at Oseredok Ukrainian Cultural and Educational Centre in Winnipeg, Canada. Participating artists: Piotr Armianovski, Yevgenia Belorusets, Svitlana Biedarieva, Zhanna Kadyrova, Yuri Koval, Roman Mikhaylov, Roman Minin, Olia Mykhailiuk, Lada Nakonechna, Yevgen Nikiforov, Kristina Norman, Mykola Ridnyi, Anton Popernyak, and works from the collection of the Izolyatsia Platform for Cultural Initiatives (Daniel Buren, Leandro Erlich, and Pascale Marthine Tayou), César Martínez Silva, and Paola Paz Yee. Texts by Yevgenia Belorusets, Svitlana Biedarieva, Uilleam Blacker, Hanna Deikun, Oleksandra Gaidai, Olesya Khromeychuk, Ricardo Macias Cardoso, César Martínez Silva, Jean Meyer, Olia Mykhailiuk, Maryna Rabinovych, Vsevolod Samokhvalov, Paola Paz Yee, and Mykola Ridnyi.

Sociologica, 2022

Describing the first months of the full-scale Russian war in Ukraine, this article considers the materiality of art during the war: the destruction and appropriation of cultural heritage and infrastructure, the risk of being violent, and losing a life. Furthermore, this essay problematizes the value and symbolism of objects and art and speaks of artworks as a strategy of intellectual and historical resistance.

Contemporary Arts Across Political Divides, 2023

This text examines the Russian artists’ strategies of making the anti-war art during the first months of the Russia's invasion into Ukraine in 2022. (unofficial draft)

EWJUS 9/1 (2022): 67-104

For the text of the article visit: https://journals.library.ualberta.ca/www.ewjus.com/index.php/ewjus/article/view/585

Open Cultural Studies, 2018

After the occupation of Crimea and the conflict in Eastern Ukraine, many people were forced to leave their homes and look for a new place to live. The cultural context, memories, narratives, including the scarcely built identity of artificially made sites like those from Donbas (Donetsk and Luhansk regions) and the multicultural identity of Crimea, were all destroyed and left behind. Among the people who left their roots and moved away were many artists, who naturally fell into two groups—the ones who wanted to remember and the ones who wanted to forget. The aim of this paper is to analyse the ways in which the local memory of those lost places is represented in the works of Ukrainian artists from the conflict territories, who were forced to change their dwelling- place. The main idea is to show how losing the memory of places, objects, sounds, etc. affects the continuity of personal history.

Post MoMA, 2022

In this text focused on how postcolonial and decolonial processes are reflected in contemporary Ukrainian culture, art historian Svitlana Biedarieva examines methods of decolonizing Ukrainian cultural discourse through the lens of works by contemporary Ukrainian artists—specifically those addressing complex aspects of identity conflicts actualized by Russia’s ongoing war of aggression against Ukraine. Each of the artworks analyzed here dismantles the notion of Ukraine’s postcolonial entanglements through discussions of memory, language, and trauma. Further, Biedarieva attempts to establish a new theoretical framework in which to understand Ukraine’s particular position on the world’s geopolitical map, taking into account the fading impact of Russian colonialism on Ukrainian territory.

Exhibition Catalogue , 2018

An Exhibition by Dr. Orysia Kulick, Research Fellow in Ukrainian Studies, School of Languages, Cultures and Literatures, TCD. The last century of Ukrainian history has been shaped by war, revolution and the struggle for statehood. The Russian Revolution of 1917 swept away the Romanov dynasty, unleashing five years of social upheaval in the southwestern borderlands. The Euromaidan Revolution of 2014 precipitated Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the outbreak of war in the Donbass. The decades in between saw civil war, famine, the Stalinist purges, mass repression and surveillance, as well as attempts by Soviet Ukrainians to reform and humanise socialism from within. Through striking works produced by several generations of writers and artists, this Exhibition on one hundred years of cultural opposition in Ukraine will provide visitors with a deeper understanding of Ukraine’s complex historical legacies, as well as various modes of cultural resistance. Featuring prominently will be reproductions of paintings, graphics, photographs, and texts produced by individuals, who fought for greater cultural and political autonomy for Ukraine within the Soviet system. The Exhibition ties struggles of the Soviet era to current events by showing images of human rights activists and political prisoners, many of whom served lengthy sentences in strict regime hard labour camps in Siberia in the 1960s and 1970s, participating in the protests of 2014. To give visual representation to the human costs of war and revolution, the Exhibition displays works by photographers Joseph Sywenkyj—a recent recipient of the prestigious W. Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography—and Anatolii Stepanov, who has spent the last four years photographing on the frontlines of the war in the Donbass.