Sergei Supinsky. Video by Ihor Svydchenko & Sergiy Volsky
Zhanna Kadyrova, an artist from Ukraine, felt that her work was worthless when Russia invaded Ukraine.
What can you do with your art against a tank? She said nothing, as she sat in her Kyiv-based studio.
The 42-year old changed her mind when galleries all over the world bought her work inspired by war, raising money to help both civilians and soldiers.
The war has ignited a huge interest in Ukrainian Culture. Contemporary artists are looking for ways to draw attention to the horrors of the country and explore ideas about its possible future.
Kadyrova, who had evacuated to the rural west Ukraine area without her usual tools and studio, spotted large stones that were smoothed out by river water. They looked like Ukrainian loaves.
She cut and shaped them, then placed them on the table to make an installation that she called Palianytsia. This is a traditional wheat bread.
Numerous jokey memes have been created around the name of this loaf. Non-Ukrainians find it difficult to pronounce and this is a way to identify Russian spies.
“We came to this project in an instant, and I was blown away by the results. I have already held about 40 exhibitions… Kadyrova: “I just returned from India. I have been to Thailand, Taiwan and America.
“And of course, after this, my disappointment with art disappeared.”
She also spoke frankly about its financial benefits. She has used it to support artists, soldiers, and to travel to frontline areas and hand out aid.
She said, “We made money that I have never seen before.”
We spend 100% of the money we receive from Palianytsia for the army.
A Russian missile fragment is used to create a sculpture by an Orthodox priest
Sergei SUPINSKY
In a Kyiv gallery, she is displaying her “Anxiety Series” — tapestries that depict kitsch cats and flowers. She over-embroiders them with air raid warnings.
She said the tapestries “depict the opposite of war”.
“When I add ‘Air Alert,’ I get a difference. This is the reality we live in.”
A ballerina’s image printed on bullet casings outside the National Opera of Ukraine, in central Kyiv, plays with similar contrasts.
The installation “Unbroken Project” is a popular place for passers-by to take selfies.
Nadiya is an interior designer. She said, “It’s important that we remind people there is still war on.”
Felipe Jacome from Ecuador, 37, used an UV printer to transfer his collaborator Svitlana onipko (26), a Ukrainian dancer now living in the Netherlands.
Opening of an exhibition featuring decorated Russian rocket fragments collected in Kyiv
Sergei SUPINSKY
Onipko performed at the National Opera of Ukraine just before the war.
Jacome says that they have raised more than $50,000 by selling the smaller versions.
He watched as two men of middle age posed before the painting, with one holding a cigar.
He said that “the message is instantly understood by the people here.”
The artist added that they wanted to exhibit their work in “different places in Europe and the United States…to continue to shed more light on the Ukrainian situation”.
Maksym Khodak, 21, was taking part in an exhibition of young artists in the PinchukArtCentre in Kyiv.
Two TikTok bloggers were persuaded to join the video artist in Kharkiv to create his installation.
In October, they spent a few nights there under constant shelling with intermittent internet and electricity.
Roman and Viktoriya were bloggers who came from the west of Ukraine. They had never seen such intense fighting.
You know that’s not cool. “Lying in bed and getting paranoid at some point that you will now be under shelling,” said Roman.
The video is shown on three screens simultaneously.
The memes are constantly being streamed, including the ex-British Prime Minister Boris Johnson dancing to a lightsaber or games that shoot Russian “orcs”.
The group stayed in an old building, which was home to avant-garde Soviet authors and artists who experimented in utopian thinking and were eventually killed during Stalinist repressions.
The building was shelled last March.
In central Kyiv, a portrait of Ukrainian ballerinas is printed in ultraviolet ink onto bullet casings and held together by resin.
Sergei SUPINSKY
Khodak: “I began to think about the new political language that can be used — basically, how to talk to my generation.”
He encouraged twenty-something bloggers, to speak in their own words about the future Ukraine.
Viktoriya called Ukraine’s co-dependence with Russia “toxic”, while Roman compared it to “a toxic old ex” who was “triggering you”.
He said: “We do not want to deal with the past.”