During the event, art historian Svitlana Biedarieva talked about the development and transformation of documentary practices in Ukrainian wartime art, analyzing works by Dana Kavelina, Vlada Ralko, Alevtina Kakhidze, and Yevgenia Belorusets. Researcher Ewa Sułek expanded on her proposal that what happened in the visual arts after 2014 can be named a “postcolonial turn”—a phenomenon based on healing and the acceptance of history and of the past in its hybrid form, without the imposition of imperial or national patterns. Artist Lesia Khomenko discussed her own practice, which is currently focused on ways of looking at the war and the relationship between the digital archives and the materiality of painting. And Nikita Kadan spoke about his own practice, which references the Ukrainian avant-garde and modernism.

This conversation is a continuation of the presentations and conversations commenced that evening.

Inga Lāce: The full-scale war has been going on for more than a year. Could you say where you’re at now, and share a few words about how your surroundings and the cultural landscape have changed.

Ewa Sułek: I am currently in Warsaw, and the city has changed tremendously—Ukrainians have become part of the urban fabric. Works by Ukrainian artists are widely exhibited, and Polish art institutions are making an effort to enable refugee artists to live and work here. When the war started, I was at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, very far from Ukraine and from my own country. While all of my Polish friends were engaged in a massive, beautiful effort to help the millions of Ukrainian refugees arriving in Poland, I felt useless. But my perspective changed once I realized that one of the reasons this war is mainly understood as colonial is that all imperial and colonial powers aim at denying subjectivity to their subjects. This reality has been influencing Ukrainian history and culture for centuries but, once revealed, can become a powerful tool of subversion. So now is exactly the time when art and academic work in Ukrainian studies as separate from Russian ones is important. I have recently completed my PhD on contemporary art centers in Kyiv from the postcolonial and neocolonial perspectives, and I am planning to publish it as a book.

Svitlana Biedarieva: In January 2022, I talked with Ukrainian artists Alevtina Kakhidze, Maria Kulikovska, Piotr Armianovski, and Lia Dostlieva and Andrii Dostliev for October about the wartime experiences of displacement and loss reflected in their art, and we also discussed the then-hypothetical threat of Russia’s attack.¹ Based on their responses, it was apparent that, at that time, such a rapid and violent turn of events seemed completely unlikely. But then the reality proved to be worse than the most pessimistic predictions.

The war-related displacement from 2014 that had affected the cultural landscape of eastern Ukraine and Crimea became the new reality for the rest of the country in February 2022. Violence and destruction in the suburbs of Kyiv reinforced the vulnerability of human life. Many artists and researchers have been forced to continue their work outside Ukraine, but rather paradoxically, this movement provided a new opportunity to globally showcase Ukrainian culture, which until recently, was largely overlooked. 

We saw much more radical forms of antiwar and anti-colonial expression. Artists and curators became more decisive and direct in their discourse, tracing the causes and consequences of the aggression through personal lenses—as direct witnesses to or victims of violence—and they set an important precedent for antiwar resistance through art in Eastern Europe, catalyzing the final dismantling of post-Soviet space together with its postcolonial agenda.

Lesia Khomenko: Immediately following the full-scale invasion, I evacuated my family from Kyiv while my husband joined the Territory Defense Forces. I moved to the United States with my daughter, and we are now based in Miami at an artist residency. Since 2014, a lot of artists from eastern Ukraine and Crimea have moved to Kyiv. There was a very interesting, dynamic exchange in the art community there between those who worked with the issue of war, observing it from outside, and those who had been forced to leave their homes, to run from the war. Now, as of February 24, 2022, there is no such difference.

Before fleeing to the US, I had been deeply involved in developing alternative art education in Ukraine beyond just Kyiv. The institutional landscape was fragile but developing fast. A lot of artists were investing their energy in expanding the context of their practices by curating, teaching, establishing residencies, or opening artist-run spaces. Since February 24, most of these new institutions have been in survival mode or functioning as volunteer hubs.

IL: Svitlana, you have been researching artists’ documentary practices since the beginning of the war in 2014. Could you elaborate on how narratives created by Ukrainian artists have shifted since the full-scale invasion in February 2022?

SB: I wrote in detail about the turn to documentary art in 2014 in the book I recently edited called Contemporary Ukrainian and Baltic Art: Political and Social Perspectives, 1991–2021.² Directly following the Maidan Revolution and Russia’s occupation of eastern Ukraine and Crimea, artists such as Yevgenia Belorusets, Piotr Armianovski, Alevtina Kakhidze, Mykola Ridnyi, Andrii Dostliev and Lia Dostlieva, and Dana Kavelina—among many others—engaged with the effects of war by undertaking documentary practices incorporating photography, text, video, and existing archives and creating new accounts focused on notions of displacement, violence, and trauma.

Researchers Erika Balsom and Hila Peleg point out that this “documentary turn” has emerged globally in response to the postcolonial transformation, when artists turned their gaze away from the centrally produced body of ideas to take up diverse local perspectives, especially through direct, often raw visual language—as has been true in Ukraine.³

Post 2022, there has been another turn in the ways that mediation has moved from social documentation and archival investigation to personal chronicle, in which the different visions of the artist’s diary—in the work of Kakhidze, Vlada Ralko, and Yevgenia Belorusets, for example—have become an emblematic form focused on trauma, the body, identity, and decolonization.

The task of documentary practices now is also to emphatically reflect on the audience’s own traumatic life experiences of destruction and human losses. The question of historical memory has become secondary.

IL: Lesia, you talked about the development of your practice, ending with your recent series Max in the Army (2022). So, I’ll start with that. What was the impulse for making this series, and what does the work open up in relation to digital technologies and images of war?

LK: It’s my first work after the full invasion and my escape from Kyiv. I depict my husband Max Robotov, who is an artist and musician, in the first weeks after he joined the army. I was curious how being a lieutenant had changed him. Early on, he sent me a photo of himself saluting in front of a dark and unclear background. He was in civilian clothes—as were most of the soldiers at the beginning of the war. This image epitomizes my personal experience of the war. The idea of the series is to reflect the merging of civil society and the army.

Since the full invasion, people are no longer allowed to take photos or videos of soldiers or military objects, because sharing them might give the enemy intelligence for an attack. Working on this series of paintings, I have been reflecting on the role and status of the image, which in the context of war has become a potentially lethal weapon. I’m using the photos that I have received from my husband—taken from outside his army unit—as well as footage circulating in the public sphere.

I’m referencing the history of battle painting and, at the same time, thinking about the role of the image and of representation in the context of the cyber war.

IL: Lesia, you and many of your peers got their education in post-Soviet Ukraine. How do you think the local education and museum system has affected your work and imagery and attitude toward painting?

LK: At my alma mater, painting is deeply rooted in the post-Soviet visual tradition, which, for me, is both problematic and productive. The programs in the state art academies in Ukraine are still based in the traditional school of the nineteenth century—corrected just a little during the Soviet period but almost unchanged in the post-Soviet period. By deconstructing the visual language of Soviet figurative painting, I’m rethinking the tools of Soviet propaganda and mythologization by comparing them to recent phenomena in the cyber war. I’m working not only with the idea of narrative but also rethinking the academic approach to producing images and to “realism” by using the method of copying or referencing traditional genres such as landscape, historical painting, or portraiture.

IL: Ewa, you talked about the curatorial strategies employed in Kyiv museums, which are rethinking their own art history, for example, bringing attention to self-taught artist Maria Prymachenko, who was falsely provincialized as the “happy peasant” by Soviet authorities. Can you delve a bit deeper into these curatorial projects and explain the context and intention behind them?

ES: I mentioned three projects in Mystetskyi Arsenal in Kyiv: Kateryna Bilokur. I want to be an artist! (2015) and Mariya Prymachenko. Boundless (2016), both of which were curated by Alisa Lozhkina, and Paraska Plytka-Horytsvit. Overcoming Gravity (2019), which was curated by Kateryna Radchenko. These exhibitions aimed to re-narrate the work and lives of the self-taught Ukrainian women artists who were practicing in Ukrainian provinces during World War II and throughout the Soviet period. Bilokur’s and Prymachenko’s work, although widely recognized, was celebrated mostly for its floral or animal motifs or decorative patterns and thus fell into the category of folk art. In Soviet times, the myth of the Ukrainian village as the source and essence of Ukrainian culture was a state-supported construct that helped in colonizing the country, and so the artists were well supported by the regime.

Bilokur’s and Prymachenko’s work was seen back then as cheerful and optimistic, features that were desired in that they conformed to Stalin’s cultural policy that art should express the joy of the communist system. In fact, the policy of folklorization of Ukraine dates back to the Russian Empire. A similar policy was executed toward the Ukrainian language, which was perceived as a dialect of the main language­—that is, of Russian.

Overcoming Gravity⁠ was devoted to a reinterpretation of Paraska Plytka-Horytsvit’s work. A painter, folklorist, ethnographer, philosopher, and photographer, Plytka-Horytsvit lived and worked in the small village of Kryvorivnia, and she led a solitary life devoted to artistic and ethnographic practices. Her life was also marked by tragedies universal to many at the time—she joined the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, and in the 1940s and ’50s, and spent almost a decade in labor camps and prisons in Germany and Siberia.

IL: Nikita, your projects are dealing with the historical references of avant-garde art and Soviet modernism. Could you elaborate on your strategy for dealing with the past, for unearthing these stories? Why is it important and what is your position with regard to it?

Nikita Kadan: I deal mostly with the ruins of the avant-garde. These ruins are covered with nationalist and neoliberal decorations, which aim to hide too radical universalist and internationalist intentions. I see my task as uncovering or unmasking these avant-garde intentions. “Back to avant-garde” means “back to universalism,” and the latter is no less paradoxical than the former. We have to go back to be able to restart the way to the future.

But local creators of universalist avant-garde work were often imprisoned and executed by the state for being “too Ukrainian.” The state publicly declared internationalist values but, in fact, reestablished a Russia-centric imperial structure for the Soviet republics and their cultural life. “Unearth” is a good word here—really. The remains of Ukrainian avant-garde creators are literally found in death pits in places of mass executions, like Sandarmokh.

The future is to be found in an execution pit—this is the horizon of the new utopia.

IL: There have been attempts across the Central Eastern Europe and Central Asia, especially the former Soviet Union countries to place their histories within the postcolonial debate and decolonial discourse. The recent full-scale invasion of Ukraine has amplified this approach among others with calls for decolonizing Russia. However, even though they share imperial domination with the postcolonial countries, their histories are very different. How, in your opinion, can we use the framework of postcolonialism and decolonization to speak about art in Ukraine?

ES: The story of Russian imperialism in Ukraine goes back much further than the Soviet Union, and a postcolonial perspective can be useful where there are relationships of domination and power that are imposed by imperial structures, like the relationship between Russian and Ukrainian cultures. I also find the concept of “coloniality” proposed by Aníbal Quijano and developed by Walter Mignolo and others helpful. While “colonialism” is a specific historical condition, “coloniality” emerged at the same time (in around 1500), and includes both imperialism and capitalism. It is not as much connected to the prevailing concept of the colony overseas based on geographical distance and racial distinctiveness, but rather to other factors stemming from the rhetoric of modernity, progress, and development. In that sense, the continuous narrative of Ukrainians as “little Russians”—meaning underdeveloped—also finds its place within this discourse. Furthermore, colonization is not only about territory, culture, or economics. There is also the colonization of minds, which likewise stems from the modern “civilizing mission,” and it includes communism.⁴

SB: My most recent research is dedicated to the dichotomy of postcoloniality/decoloniality in contemporary Ukrainian art and culture. I also employ a typology formed by [Madina] Tlostanova, who distinguishes between postcoloniality and decoloniality not only from a paradigmatic point of view, such as the postcolonial theory that was developed by such theorists as Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak and the decolonial theory by Latin American scholars Walter Mignolo and Aníbal Quijano, but also from a chronological perspective. The postcolonial development in Tlostanova’s model immediately follows the anti-colonial resistance and resulting downfall of an empire when a society of a now-independent country reworks its recent colonial experience.⁵ The decolonial process, however, goes one step further in its liberation from any colonialism-related elements, which is exactly what we are witnessing today in wartime Ukraine. I believe, however, that a new theory is needed to describe Ukraine’s complex situation in the post-Soviet space. In my research and the book that is currently under contract with Palgrave Macmillan, I use this theory as a cornerstone for developing a model that would be suitable for the Ukrainian/Russian case.

My position is that art in Ukraine has recorded how Ukrainian society went through a postcolonial stage after 1991 and entered a decolonial stage in February 2022. First, artists are dismantling postcolonial narratives and substituting them with decolonial ones, and second, they are creating new content that conceptually breaks with the imperial legacy of Russia. The current traumatic experience of war serves as the impulse for decolonial transformations—from the anti-colonial calls to cancel Russian culture to the civilized decolonization of institutions of power.

LK: I consider decolonial discourse in Ukraine extremely important. Articulated since 2014, it is in its hottest phase ever. But there is a contradiction among Ukrainian intellectuals: some insist on complete decommunization and on the de-Russification of public space and culture, while others propose rethinking and the reappropriation of certain names and phenomena. I think that the role of artists in this process is very important, because artists build nonlinear narratives and are able to operate within a complex system of paradoxes.

IL: Nikita, in your prompt, you mentioned the changes in the perception of the notion of the avant-garde in post-1991 and post-2014 Ukraine, as well as the (im)possibility of a “national avant-garde.” Could you elaborate on this position?

NK: Early post-Soviet perception was part of Ukraine’s “multi-vector” position in the 1990s and early 2000s, when lots of imperial patterns in culture remained untouched. But the return of the Ukrainian avant-garde to the narrated history was often initiated by people whose position was rather conservative. [Mikhail] Semenko or [Valerian] Polischuk, [Maria] Siniakova or [Anatoly] Petritsky, [Boris] Kosarev or [Vasyl] Yermylov were observed through optics, in which “national” elements in their practices were seen as much better than “cosmopolitan” ones. And this very much differs from the original intentions of most Ukrainian avant-garde and modernist figures. On the other hand, the imperial phenomenon of the “Russian avant-garde” was not really questioned by decolonial thought and was not so problematic for many art professionals and audiences in Ukraine. So narrating avant-garde figures as conjointly Ukrainian, cosmopolitan, and non-Russian was like being between Scylla and Charybdis. 2014 made the “nation-centric” views more popular. At the same time, the field of discussion became broader, and the positions opposing both narrow national-conservative thinking and cultural neocolonialism became more visible.

IL: Could you talk about how your practices as researchers and artists have changed since the full-scale invasion in relation to representing a certain nation state and its art scene. I am thinking of many of our previous conversations, which have been full of ideas of cosmopolitanism, transnational research, and the fact that you are fundamentally international artists and scholars. However, with the war, the pressure to serve national representation seems to be very high. How does it resonate in your art and other activities? How do you negotiate this pressure?

ES: As a non-Ukrainian, I initially found myself doubting my right to comment on art practices in Ukraine now, since it is not possible to fully understand what it means to live and work in a country at war unless one personally experiences it. I have been working with Ukrainian art since 2014, and as a Polish scholar exploring Ukrainian topics, my postcolonial perspective has, at least a couple times, been criticized as a form of Orientalization. An interesting article titled “Explaining the ‘Westsplainers’: Can a Western Scholar Be an Authority on Central and Eastern Europe” was published by Aliaksei Kazharski in July 2022.⁶ It shows that we are maybe even more cautious now about who speaks about what and who is given a voice.

SB: I don’t see speaking about Ukraine or the war as the pressure to serve national representation, but rather as the only means of active protest against the war. Even though, currently, it’s very difficult to make any parallels or comparisons, in 2019, I spoke of the war in Ukraine to Latin American and Canadian audiences as part of the interdisciplinary project At the Front Line. Ukrainian Art, 2013–2019, which took place in Mexico City and Winnipeg. This was the first large-scale research-led project in Latin America focused on the war in Ukraine that addressed the common experiences of conflict, violence, and displacement. When speaking about Euromaidan, for example, we encountered a vivid response from Mexican audiences who remembered or even witnessed the Tlatelolco massacre in 1968; similarly, stories of Russian military violence in eastern Ukraine prompted comparison with the drug cartels’ violent actions in the north of Mexico.

LK: The current attention being given to Ukrainian artists is helping us to better articulate a lot of messages. At the same time, there is very high turbulence in Ukrainian society itself, and a lot of artists are balancing between pure propaganda and critical artistic gestures, between personal stories and general conclusions. These debates, as well as the visibility of artists is very important for postwar Ukraine.

IL: Even though there is this visibility, in the context of the current war, there is a danger that Ukrainian art and artists are reduced to speaking only about the war. How do you deal with that?

LK: I’ve been working with the issue of war for more than ten years. I had been researching World War II and working with the story of my grandfather and Soviet postwar paintings. Now I’m looking at the current war through the perspective of the role of the image and representation—and, of course, I’m thinking about commemoration and the creation of historical narratives. Footage of this war has made me think about how war affects the global civilization in general and what it means to be visible—how security issues and technology are changing our optics. Personally it’s difficult to think about anything else but the war. And, on the other hand, to convey knowledge of the war with nuance is extremely important to resisting the propaganda machine.

NK: Ukrainian artists speak about reality. And reality is impregnated by war. Landscape is a war landscape. Bodies are war bodies. It is a big shift in our sensitivity. Now you even don’t have to show war literally, directly—it is in your work anyhow. I still make work about forgotten and interrupted stories of Ukrainian modernism. About stories of local twentieth-century art history. But these stories are read through the lens of war. There is no other way.

IL: Our discussion takes place in the context of The Museum of Modern Art, thus an important issue for us is to understand how your research and artistic practices impact the art historical narratives and museum practices in relation to art from Ukraine. What is your take on that?

ES: It is important not to engage the norms imposed by the Western point of view, which tends to see Ukraine as “Other” and to exoticize the vaguely defined “East” as a continued form of silencing and trivialization by the dominant discourses. Eastern Europe has been an object of the colonial gaze from both the West and Russia, and a certain image of this place has been imposed. Less interest has been given to art from Ukraine or Poland than to work coming from Russia. Such an attitude strengthens the imperial status quo. Artists and researchers decolonize Ukraine by rewriting the story of the land and region from a Ukrainian as opposed to Russian perspective—discerning its uniqueness, and creating narrations distinct from those imposed in Soviet times and earlier, in the times of the Russian Empire—and, at the same time, recognizing the hybridity that emerged due to decades of existence in the frames of both systems.

SB: I agree with Ewa. For example, many artists, particularly those working in the 1920s–30s avant-garde, who were born or worked in Ukraine, are still labeled “Russian,” which of course is being corrected now with urgency but is still a process often flawed or lacking research. So involving Ukrainian art historians and curators can help a lot.

IL: Is there anything that you feel is missing in the discussion about art in and from Ukraine that you would like to raise here?

SB: Everyone’s talked a lot about the war. I believe that what is missing currently in the international discussion on Ukrainian art is taking into account its heterogeneity, development of the classification of its chronological stages, and critical currents linked to the personal position and style of each artist. Otherwise, in trying to develop a Ukrainian “trademark” in terms of art, we risk overgeneralization. But this art historical systematization needs to be undertaken with a certain historical distance, as it is often impossible to grasp the entire panorama while in the epicenter of war.

_{post presents: Art, Resistance, and New Narratives in Response to the War in Ukraine was co-organized with the Polish Cultural Institute New York and co-sponsored by the James Gallery at CUNY. Promotional support was provided by the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University.}

_{post presents is a series of talks devoted to the cross-geographical consideration of modern and contemporary art. The sessions are an extension of post, MoMA’s online platform devoted to art from a global perspective.}

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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.

Decolonial Liberation of Ukraine / Self-Colonization of Russia

Many of the works created by Ukrainian artists during the last eight years reflect on the postcolonial state and traumatic memories of Ukraine’s entanglement with Russia before and throughout the twentieth century.¹ However, since Russian bombs began falling on Ukrainian towns, killing Ukrainian civilians, including children, and destroying thousands of Ukrainian people’s homes, unfolding in a full-scale Russian invasion of the country in February 2022, understanding of this postcolonial entanglement has changed—as has the attitude toward decoloniality in Ukrainian culture.² Art is one of the indicators of such a profound liberation impulse.

To start off, I would like to argue that notions of the postcolonial and decolonial are not interchangeable in terms of the war and history between Ukraine and Russia; rather they reflect two different stages of liberation from entanglement. While the former denotes the situation immediately following the colonial experience and anti-colonial struggle, taking on all the implications of colonialism with the intention of reinterpreting them, the latter speaks about the final process of dismantling the colonial narrative. Decolonial researcher Madina Tlostanova remarks on the chronological and logical discrepancies between the two approaches: “The postcolonial condition is more of an objective given, a geopolitical and geohistorical situation of many people coming from former colonies. The decolonial stance is one step further, as it involves a conscious choice of how to interpret reality and how to act upon it.”³ The atrocities of the anachronistic Russian war of aggression have brought Ukraine to the culmination of its decolonial stage, with the once-dominating narrative of Russian culture “enveloping” Ukrainian culture having fallen apart to the point of no return. Indeed, any further aggressive action on the part of Russia toward Ukraine will only continue to foster what is an inevitable shift.

We observe a very different process in Russia, where ongoing Ukrainian disentanglement provokes Russian obsession not only with Ukraine’s territory, but also with the minds and souls of the Ukrainian people. In this Russian pursuit of the unachievable, the war represents a notorious case of “self-colonization,” in which Russia has emotionally aligned itself with a culture and geographical space to which it has no right.⁴ Ukraine has become a Russian territory of desire, and Russia, in longing to occupy Ukraine, has in effect converted itself into Ukraine’s invisible colony. Currently, it is Russia that persists in simultaneous colonial and anti-colonial stages and has not yet reached the postcolonial condition—a state impossible to achieve without the removal of tyranny and the decentralization of power and institutions. This social and cultural divergence between the two countries is enormous, and though the outcomes for Ukraine are extremely painful, for Russia, they will be fatal unless internal resistance brings the country to a more advanced postcolonial stage. Ukrainian determination toward decoloniality is expressed in recent artworks that reflect on the metamorphosis fostered by the rapid transition from what can be interpreted as a postcolonial state to decoloniality in the last eight years. Further, some works deal with this postcolonial/decolonial dynamic through language.

Dissolving Postcolonial Ambiguity

The work #hero (2014–20) by Anton Lapov is a media installation that gathers data from the Internet to challenge the logic of a digital environment that, after 2014, permitted different political perspectives and, at the same time, gave way to pro-Russian propaganda. Lapov created a generative hypertextual system that constructs a nonselective database formed of portraits of people found under the hashtag “hero” at a particular localized network. These images are further blended into a single, shifting composite portrait, whose features morph as new digital images are added. Lapov intended to show how the overflow of propaganda distorted judgment regarding the outbreak of the Russian war in Ukraine in 2014 as well as led to initial confusion. He also aimed to question whether the “heroic” criteria were any more reliable in times of profound political confrontation and amid a heated information war. This work is an example of the postcolonial “ambivalence” that, as interpreted by critical theorist Homi Bhabha, occurs when the oppressor and the oppressed share similar features, and the dominant culture infects its colonial domain with its own cultural identity.⁵ As the situation following the 2022 full-scale invasion has shown, Russia’s strategy has relied on a similar type of ambivalence—that is, Russia’s hope that Ukrainian society forms a similar kind of nonselective hypertext, and that Russian propaganda leads to Ukrainian support of Russian aggression within Ukrainian territory. The Ukrainian resistance against the invaders, however, confirms that mediatic reality is different from the real status of things. The Ukrainian people’s heartfelt struggle against the Russian war is testament to the fact that postcolonial ambivalence is not characteristic of Ukrainian society, marking not only the end of the debate around ambivalence, but also the birth of a decolonial culture.

Another work that reflects on varying points of view on violence is Blind Spot (2014) by Mykola Ridnyi. In this series of photographs of a building in eastern Ukraine heavily damaged by Russian shelling, a circular “blind spot,” in fact a black ink blot, obscures a significant part of every image. In some works, the extent of the destruction is covered in ink and thus no longer visible, permitting only the surrounding landscape to be seen, while in others, the rubble is visible though seemingly removed from its surrounding context. In a version of the project realized together with Ukrainian poet Serhiy Zhadan on a large banner partially covering a building in Berlin, a small circular view of rubble from a destroyed building in Luhansk appears to float, untethered in a field of black. Ridnyi visually addresses the gradual loss of visibility of violence and voluntary societal blindness to traumatic war events. Zhadan, in his turn, uses words to address the theme of destruction, recalling the bombing of a museum in Donetsk and pointing out that the devastation of buildings and cultural heritage rarely stays in the public memory of those who did not inhabit the place in which it occurred. This work can also be read in a more general way, as a metaphor for the invisibility of evil as a postcolonial condition—or more specifically, for the fact that the peripheral territories in eastern Ukraine were not considered of ultimate importance when war broke out there in 2014. In 2022, however, it has become clear that the avoidance of the topic of the war in the east did not resolve the problem but rather made it deeper. Indeed, the crimes hiding behind blind spots are now in plain sight.

Artist and writer Yevgenia Belorusets’s daily dispatches from wartime Kyiv, which she began posting amid the full-scale invasion in February 2022, present a human view of the horrors in which the city and its surroundings have been immersed since the beginning of the Russian attacks:

In the evening I learned that a friend of mine was evacuated from the small town of Irpin, northwest of Kyiv. On the way, she lost her dog, who was frightened by the explosions and ran off in a panic. She saw with her own eyes how women with children were being targeted as they tried to get on an evacuation bus. Then something heavy crashed to the ground not far from them, a bomb perhaps, and everyone on the bus was knocked over. My friend told me, “I want to survive so I can describe this evacuation in The Hague.” . . . Some were murdered during the evacuation. The estimate so far is six women and children, but the exact number of victims and injured is still being clarified.⁶

This diary excerpt exemplifies observation and reporting in which there are no blind spots, no ambivalence of vision, as Ukraine and the world clearly see the Russian war crimes, including the killings of civilians. The paradigmatic space of the oppressor’s cultural identity has been entirely eliminated among the Ukrainian people, who have witnessed untold violence, destruction, and death unjustly brought upon them by Russia.

Releasing Language

The use of language in the context of the Russian war against Ukraine is discussed in War in Ukraine (2015), a work by Lada Nakonechna. The artist produced a series of typed texts in which she explores how language structures are conditioned by particular political positions and modes of thinking. Small details, such as the order of words or the use of prepositions, can change the meaning of a phrase. In every example, the artist uses three related phrasal structures, where the meaning has been profoundly transformed to reveal how linguistic clichés reflect underlying paradigms—such as “Civil  war on  in Ukraine,” “The armed conflict in the east of Ukraine,” and “Russian-Ukrainian war.” The ways in which these phrases are constructed make clear the points of view from which they are generated: how they distinguish between the subject and object of the aggression, and expose particular ideas either promoted by Russian propaganda or conventionally accepted by the Ukrainian mass media. These phrases are not related to the specific use of the Ukrainian or Russian language; rather the syntax and vocabulary form the intended meaning. Though made in 2015, the work remains relevant in 2022 beyond the Ukrainian media sphere, as Russian propaganda and the Western media alike often describe the war as a “conflict,” in effect belittling its importance and blurring the reality of the actual situation.

The linguistic discrepancy within Ukrainian bilingualism has been challenged by such early post-Soviet works as The Three-Letter Box (1994), an installation and performance by Fast Reaction Group. The artists Sergei Bratkov and Boris Mikhailov created a “Pandora’s box” containing the three letters ї, і, and є, which highlight the difference between the Russian and Ukrainian languages, and use it to make a political statement emphasizing linguistic divergence as a postcolonial process.⁷  As was characteristic in the first two decades of Ukrainian independence, embracing such binary opposition was key to the self-identification process of the Ukrainian political nation at that time. The three Ukrainian letters, clear markers of belonging at a time when the nation-state structure was still unstable and social anxiety about post-socialist cultural resistance was high, were important to Ukrainian identity formation. The work was made in the period of transition, when post-Soviet transformations encouraged the use of Ukrainian language, the return to which was considered an important element of cultural identity—yet leaving existential space for the use of Russian in different Ukrainian regions.  

In his performance Force Me to Speak Ukrainian (2019), Taras Kamennoy referred to The Three-Letter Box as he explored how the imperative of the use of Ukrainian as the official language may or may not be incorporated into the public sphere of Russian-speaking Kharkiv. The project, in the artist’s words, was provoked by one of his Russian relatives, who wondered whether Kamennoy was being forced by the “nationalist” government to speak Ukrainian. To challenge this colonialist view, the artist presented a performance on the streets of Kharkiv, where he approached people, carrying a banner that asked them to “force” him to speak Ukrainian. He then documented the replies, which ranged from surprised to the affirmative—that is, that it would be good for him to switch to Ukrainian as the official state language; however, he failed to obtain the imperative that he sought. This work challenged Russia’s view of Ukraine as a controlling environment, similar to Russia’s authoritarian position. Kamennoy emphasized the freedom of choice and expression upon which Ukrainian solidarity heavily relies. This solidarity, together with pluralism, defined Ukrainian resilience in the protests of the Maidan revolution in 2013, and the subsequent war with Russia in the Donbas—making Ukraine very different from its neighboring country, which has proclaimed itself heir to a colonialist empire.

As these projects show, political conflict may reside in ways of speaking, rather than in the language spoken. And this understanding is an essential principle in the Ukrainian decolonization process. As Ukrainian historian Yaroslav Hrytsak has written: “In a piece on the 2014 fighting around the Donetsk airport, Los Angeles Times correspondent Sergei Loiko noted that inside the airport, Ukrainian military forces used exclusively Russian as their operative language and Ukrainian was nowhere to be heard. What struck him the most was how pure, cultured, and almost literary their Russian was.”⁸  Hrytsak concludes from this incident that the postcolonial condition in Ukraine—if this is indeed the right paradigm to describe the situation—could not be reduced to cultural dominance through language.

Curator Kateryna Botanova proposes that languages and identities have been weaponized and instrumentalized in Ukraine as part of the post-Soviet neo-capitalistic electoral struggle. The efforts of election-related public protests in 2004 and 2013 undermined Russian-led efforts to use language as a marker of identity in Ukraine, emphasizing instead the complexity of the past and the solidarity beyond linguistics as characteristic of a political Ukrainian nation. The ongoing collective struggle against Russia’s violent and dirty war in Ukraine only increases this sense of solidarity. In erasing the possibility of using language in the colonial discourse, language is turned into yet another tool of decolonization. Quoting one of the Ukrainian artists, Botanova proposes that “The Russian language will be our war trophy.”⁹

Disentangling Memory

Turning to the traumatic past, Andrii Dostliev and Lia Dostlieva’s series of collages I still feel sorry when I throw away food—Grandma used to tell me stories about the Holodomor (2018) is a reflection on the 1932–33 famine provoked by the Stalinist repression of Ukrainian peasants. One of the most powerful traumatic moments in twentieth-century Ukrainian history is reinterpreted by the artists as subtle prints of spoiled food on paper. Today, the work painfully resonates with the current situation in Mariupol, where because of the blockade, food is scarce and people are dying not only from shelling but also from starvation.¹⁰This is a new form of genocide unfolding in Ukraine, ninety years after the Stalinist famines, as Russia intends to replay its colonialist intentions in contemporary conditions. In Dostliev and Dostlieva’s work, images generated by food that has been thrown away are juxtaposed with images of anonymous landscapes that evoke permanence. Genocide by starvation does not impact the landscape—unlike genocide caused by Russian bombing in Mariupol. The death, caused by shelling, becomes embedded in it, leaving a permanent trace. As art researcher Kateryna Iakovlenko puts it when she poetically speaks of war destructions and the continuous explosions in the sky over Ukraine: “On February 24, the beauty of the sunrise was stolen from us.”¹¹

In subtle dialogue with the theme of hunger, Zhanna Kadyrova’s new work Palianytsia (2022) reverses the vision of food as a source of life undertaken by Andrii Dostliev and Lia Dostlieva, and, in particular, of bread as a sign of hospitality, turning the latter into a means of resistance. “Palianytsia” describes a type of Ukrainian bread that has reportedly been used to reveal suspected Russian saboteurs, who are unable to pronounce the word correctly. Moreover, due to some differences in Ukrainian and Russian phonetics, it has proven difficult for monolingual Russian speakers to spell the word in its conventional form. In western Ukraine, where Kadyrova was in evacuation, she set a table, replacing the bread with sliced river stones—as unbitable and inedible as Ukrainian phonetics and Ukrainian territory are to the Russians. This project presents the ultimate decolonial gesture of inverting the theme of hunger, turning it against the enemy who came to kill, and thus, in breaking up with historical trauma, reinterpreting food as an instrument of resistance.

Exiting the Decolonial Condition

Works such as those by Ridnyi and Zhadan, Nakonechna and Lapov—which use ambivalence or hybridity of the relative positions of the colonizer and colonized as their moving force—have shifted in their focus from internal to external since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022 and Ukrainians fully broke with the Russian cultural sphere. All of the controversies and diversities of positions of which the artists speak have been at once and forever erased by Russia’s ongoing attack. The ambiguity is gone, as is Ukraine’s postcolonial struggle. For Ukraine, this inhumane war, however painful and unbelievably destructive, marks not only the country’s release from postcolonial entanglements, but also its definitive entrance into the decolonial stage. Both the post-socialist and postcolonial conditions gradually evaporated from the territory of Ukraine after 2014, and the selfless yet harsh resistance of the Ukrainian people against the Russian invaders has shown that any other entanglements have also disappeared.

In Ukraine’s particular decolonial case, Russia is no longer present as a political or cultural agent of impact. Among Ukrainians, there is more than a general lack of interest in Russia and its territory; indeed, there is a conscious collective position of distancing to avoid entanglement. We are yet to invent a new framework for interpreting and describing the decolonial state in which we find ourselves, for it goes beyond any existing postcolonial or decolonial paradigm. In Russia’s own simultaneous colonial and anticolonial case, the self-colonization through desire and affection toward Ukraine keeps it in an anachronic time-lapse state, stunts its progress, and is leading to its decay and eventual ruin. Meanwhile, the decolonial process of release in Ukraine carries on at an unprecedented pace—despite the flames of war and loss of heritage.  

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