THIS IS UKRAINE: DEFENDING FREEDOM @ VENICE 2022
A Collateral Event of the 59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia

Iron, rubble, archival prints (postcards and photographs), proof of war, added objects from Kyiv and Kharkiv.
Courtesy of the artist and Transit gallery.

The voice of evidence. Objects of war collected from Donbas in 2015 and Kyiv 2022. They are evidence of disaster. This is the second iteration of the work presented at the Ukrainian National pavilion in 2015. Now the work is open and expanding, as opposed to the previously closed vitrine that was suggestive of healing. The wound is open, the war ongoing, the end unknown…

The first version of the work Difficulties of Profanation (2015) was created during the first year of the war Russia launched in Donbas. A traditional display case, its form referring to the Soviet-era display cases typically found in Ukrainian WWII museums, held materials that the artist collected in the then destroyed cities of eastern Ukraine. Among the debris, we can recognize familiar objects and words that are embedded with private memories, as well as with the historical past. These are smashed remnants of everyday lives. At the same time, damaged signs from Donbas bearing Soviet-era toponyms invite us to think about the geography of ideological narrative and its consequences. Amidst the rubble, inside the case, there was a bean plant growing, bringing a hope for recovery. Transforming a museum vitrine into a greenhouse was an act of 'profanation' in the Agambenian sense — taking its content from the 'sacred' space of the museum's ideologically controlled narrative and bringing it to the 'profane' space of everyday life.

In 2022 Nikita Kadan removed the display case and destroyed the garden.The open form of the work emphasizes the very nature of this war — unstopped and uncontrolled, it is a war that has expanded from the east of Ukraine to engulf the entire country. What was a "conflict" that had already moved to the periphery of the world's attention in 2015, has, in 2022, become a full scale war. The objects of evidence from Donbas in 2015 have been combined with objects collected in Kyiv in March 2022 — evidence of Russia's unprovoked attack on Ukraine, evidence of a war that never stopped. It becomes a monument to ongoing destruction, an expanding structure that is a frightening memento of the inevitable acceleration of Russian state violence.

A selection of archival images (postcards and photographs) are another added element. They refer to the Soviet narrative of the "Great Patriotic War", which is used in Russian propaganda to create "heroic" analogies that justify the brutal violence of the Russian military, but at the same time is based on the real experience of the Second World War, an experience that is shared by Ukraine.

Texts and photos.

Originally written in German for Der Spiegel magazine.

Translated, edited and published by ISOLARII (Sebastian Clark and India Ennenga) with additional translations by Greg Nissan, designed by Office Ben Ganz. The diary was released daily on isolarii.com from February 24th, the first day of invasion, until April 4th.

Courtesy of the Artist.

The voice of a witness. Every day from February 24th till April 10th, for 40 days of war, Yevgenia Belorusets wrote, intending each text to be the final entry. This is a diary that wants to end.

When the bombings started in Kyiv, photographer and writer Yevgenia Belorusets decided to stay, there in her home city, convinced the war would not last long. She wrote her first entry on February 24th. Until April 4th she kept her diary on a daily basis, writing it as if "every entry should be the last", hoping for the end of war. Each new entry was released online each day at 4:00 pm EST. Its subjective news of the war, a witness statement, aimed to convey not what happens from above, but how it feels on the ground.

In 2018 Yevgenia released her book Lucky Breaks. It told private stories of women whose lives were affected by the war in Donbas (ongoing since 2014). Today she has become one of those women, a witness telling her own story from the heart of disaster.

Acrylic on canvas.

Courtesy of the Artist.

The impossible image. Khomenko paints from forbidden photographs taken by her husband. Four monumental paintings of volunteering soldiers: an IT-engineer, a chemist, a lawyer, and an artist. Photographs have become a dangerous tool of communication, sharing might give the enemy intelligence for an attack.

While the photograph risks revealing too much information, it fails to touch reality all together. The real image of war cannot be expressed, a photograph remains a vague, accidental and partial impression of the real. Khomenko's paintings expand the photograph, they include the impossibility of the image itself while making the protagonists larger than life. They are heroes to all Ukrainians, nameless and undepictable.

The starting point for the "Max in the army" series by Lesia Khomenko was a photo portrait of her husband, Max Robotov, made after he joined the army and she with her daughter evacuated from Kyiv. "For me it was like teleporting my husband, an attempt to make him closer", says the artist.

Now that Khomenko has established this teleportation channel between herself and the war, she keeps it open. She continues to depict her husband's military comrades, using the pictures taken by him in the army. For Lesa, this collaboration is a way to be involved in her husband's struggle, and also a way for the couple to maintain an artistic dialogue as they would have done previously, in spite of Max's new military reality.

Working on this series Khomenko reflects on the role and status of the image, which in the context of war literally became a lethal weapon. Is it possible to disarm it through painting and transform it into something else — a love letter perhaps?

Paper, gouache.

Courtesy of The Andrey Sheptytsky National Museum in Lviv.

The image of heritage. In February 2022 Ivankiv Historical and Local History Museum, home to 25 works by Maria Prymachenko, was burned to the ground by Russian forces. Risking his life, a local man took it upon himself to rescue what he could of the collection. By recovering these paintings, with their amazing and other-worldly creatures, he preserved a crucial part of Ukrainian cultural heritage.

Maria Prymachenko was a self-taught Ukrainian artist, born in 1909 in the village of Bolotnya in Ivankiv Raion, Kyiv Oblast. She is well known for her surreal paintings of bizarre nonexistent beasts and plants that combined Ukrainian folk aesthetics and the artist's unbridled imagination.

Her work is usually associated with naive art, yet in 1936 she studied in the Central Experimental Workshop of the Kyiv Museum of Ukrainian Art, where prominent Ukrainian avant-garde artists such as Anatil Petrytsky and Vasyl Krychevsky were then teaching. She achieved international recognition at the early stage of her career and has been actively exhibited worldwide. In 1937 she participated at the International Exhibition in Paris where her paintings received an enthusiastic review from Pablo Picasso. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) declared 2009 the year of Maria Prymachenko.

The works on display belong to the so-called "beast series", featuring a collection of centaur-like creatures envisioned by the artist. Many of them paradoxically combine frightening monstrousness with fair, childlike features, charming but at the same time threatening. Some of Prymachenko's beasts, despite their surrealism, came into existence in response to historical and political events experienced by the artist, including the First and the Second World Wars.

Four-channel video installation (color, sound). 12 minutes.

Courtesy of the Marina Abramović Archives.

The work Count on Us was created by Marina Abramovic in response to the Balkan Wars, known for their cruelty and the great number of civilian casualties. A similar barbarism has shocked the world again, this time committed by Russian soldiers against the peaceful Ukrainian residents of Bucha, Irpin and other cities that have temporarily fallen under occupation.

Count on Us is a heartbreaking warning that crimes against humanity must be decisively fought with the solidarity and united efforts of all humanity. If we do not resist, the evil will expand and the horror will be repeated. At the same time, the work is a declaration of hope, and of a desire to live and love that cannot be destroyed. Acts of genocide are now repeating in Ukraine, and the world is once again called to unite against them.

C-print.

Courtesy of the Artist.

Temptation of Death are visual poems where Boris Mikhailov stares his own life—and the past of the Soviet Union—in the eye. The work embraces the artist's own mortality together with the demise of the Soviet past.

Temptation of Death is an extensive photographic series that consists of more than 150 pairings, where the artist's distinct autobiographical tune is inseparable from a bleak social premonition. The formal diptych structure evokes strong feelings of the ambiguity and paradox of human life, where the most beautiful and the most terrifying things are incomprehensibly entangled.

Lighthouse lens (dated ca.1900), colour-effect filter cylinder, halogen light bulb, fluorescent light, brass, steel, ballast

Courtesy of the artist; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los Angeles; neugerriemschneider, Berlin © 2020 Olafur Eliasson.

The SOS signal of Your Lost Lighthouse cannot be more current. Although it uses an antique lighthouse lens dated circa 1900, the beacon no longer functions as a reliable guide in the darkness, saving people's lives at sea. It now stands as a symbol of ongoing war, an emergency that cannot be avoided but must be stopped.

Photographers: Hanna Hrabarska, Hanna Zolotniuk, Oksana Kanivets, Yevhenii Kershkov, Maxym Kozmenko, Oleksandr Kornyakov, Inna Liudvyk, Anton Malynovskyi, Valeriy Miloserdov, Mustafa Nayyem, Viktor Stadnyk, Oleksandr Techynskyi

Courtesy Mirror Weekly.

300 portraits of mothers who lost a son in the Russo-Ukrainian War on the Donetsk and Luhansk fronts in the period from 2014 - 2015. These photographs are a reminder of when the war started, and a tribute to young soldiers who died defending their land.

Each portrait is signed with the name of the mother and her son, along with his age and a pet name she used to call him as a child.

Russian propaganda has actively sought to demonize the Ukrainian military, calling them "Nazis" because they came to the defense of their own land. As the events of 2022 have shown, Russian propaganda has successfully dehumanized Ukrainians in the eyes of the Russian people - soldiers and civilians alike - paving the way for the ongoing invasion.

Before the Russian invasion on February 24th, 2022, over 14,000 people had lost their lives in a war that was already nearly forgotten in the West. Today the death toll is unknown. While Russia refuses to officially recognise many of its fallen soldiers, hiding their deaths from their families, the mothers of fallen Ukrainians know, and they speak.

Acrylic, platinum leaf and gold leaf on canvas mounted on aluminum frame.

Courtesy PinchukArtCentre (Kyiv, Ukraine).

Takashi Murakami created "War and Peace" in 2015 in response to the annexation of Crimea and the occupation of parts of Donetsk and Luhansk regions. Today this becomes an iconic image for Ukraine: a country fighting for its very existence, fighting for peace, fighting for the right to exist.

Today this title, a reference to the world-famous novel by Russian writer Leo Tolstoy, becomes a complication for a work dedicated to Ukraine under Russian attack. Can we read Ukrainian history through the cultural lens of an aggressor country? Here it becomes a provocative gesture, inviting us to think more carefully about the relationship between culture, politics, and violence.

Five-year-old Valeriia, a Ukrainian refugee from Kryvyi Rih, is one of more than four million Ukrainian children who have been forced to flee their homes to survive.

The momumental tarp, depicting Valeriia, was unfolded in an action in Lviv as a tragic reference to the deliberate bombing of the Mariupol Drama Theater by Russian aircraft. For this dynamic and monumental work, JR recruited more than 100 Lviv volunteers.The image reached Time magazine and the action extended across different parts of the world, most recently on the 13th of April on the Piazza San Marco in Venice.

Uncountable children have died in Russia's vile and ruthless war against Ukrainian cities, neighborhoods, orphanages, hospitals, kindergartens, maternity hospitals and shelters.

Oil on canvas.

Courtesy National Art Museum of Ukraine.

For artists who lived under the Soviet Union, the depiction of nature was often a door to escape from the oppressive social environment and obligatory ideological narratives. Tetyana Yablonska's painting "Youth" is like a dream or a fantasy about another reality, where the hero looks into the bottomless blue of a small lake as if into a future full of hope and the thrill of the unknown.

Although socialist realism was the only style authorized for Soviet artists, many of them invented individual ways to overcome its limitations. Tatyana Yablonska was a professor and a full member of the Academy of Arts of the USSR, as well as a recipient of numerous state awards and honored as People's Artist of the USSR. Few artists were as respected and privileged by the Soviet government. At the same time, she was able to create her own unique visual world, full of vibrant light and crisp air, which transcended any ideological agenda. The narrative of "Youth" is abstract and poetic, and the style and color of the painting create a surreal sense. The bare, otherworldly landscape is a realm of potentiality, where nothing is decided yet and everything is possible.

Courtesy The Andrey Sheptytsky National Museum in Lviv.

The Mother of God holds the episcopal omophorion in her hands, protecting the faithful. This iconography is unique to the Eastern Christian tradition, yet has similarities with the Western Christian story of the Madonna of Mercy. The cult of the protective icon established itself in the Ukrainian icon-painting tradition from the 12th to the 13th century.

The cult of the Intercession of the Virgin in art and culture was most vividly embodied during the Cossack period. The Virgin was considered the heavenly patron saint of the Cossack army, and even the consecration of the church of the Zaporizhzhian Sich was timed to the holiday of the Intercession of the Virgin. Since then, the sacred image of Our Lady of the Intercession has been a symbol of the Ukrainian army. Today it has once again risen to prominence in Ukrainian visual culture.

Over the centuries, the interpretation of sacred images has become increasingly diverse, transformed into visual archetypes, which are read both in terms of their original religious significance and in the context of recent historical processes.

As such, in this crowd of believers we can see today's tragic footage of the evacuation of Irpin, a city attacked near Kyiv. The people of Irpin hid from shelling under the ruins of a destroyed bridge. And, in the omophorion that the Mother of God uses to protect the faithful, we now see the protective dome of the No Fly Zone that Ukrainians are begging the international community to provide.

Bronze. Edition of 10.

Private Collection.

Some historical moments provoke head on responses. Damien Hirst's Wretched War is one such response. The war crimes of Bucha lay fresh in our collective memory, even as we recognize that they are only the tip of the iceberg. And yet, beyond all violence, the posture of the victim's body expresses unexpected strength and confidence.

The figure's pose is borrowed by the artist from a sculpture by the Impressionist Edgar Degas — his famous Study in the Nude for The Little Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer (circa 1880). Despite missing her head in Hirst version, the dancer continues to stand firmly on her sterling silver feet, like some immortal and undefeatable creature from a science fiction film.

Butterflies and household gloss on canvas.

Private Collection.

Sky Over Corn Field was created in solidarity with Ukraine, in direct response to Russia's violent and unprovoked invasion. The butterflies embody both tragedy and hope, speaking equally to both mortality and immortality.

Hirst explains that his obsession with butterflies stems from the idea that even when butterflies are dead, they appear alive. The metaphor of the butterfly holds special significance in numerous mythologies, representing spiritual rebirth, transformation, change, hope, and life.