This is a piece I wrote for the New European. The work of these young Ukrainian photographers is mightily impressive.
There is little to lift Ukrainian photographer Rehina Bukvuch from her mood of bleak pessimism.
“We believe Russia is preparing for another offensive. There is no sense of a ceasefire, on the contrary Russia is bombing us more than ever. We are anxious about Trump and his policies but in reality we have no other choice.
“So for us, if the Russia comes all of this will end. We will either have to leave our country or be sent to a gulag - there will be no life for us. We know Russia’s policies and if they occupy us they will try to completely erase us so that Ukraine never resists again.”
The ‘all’ she refers to is, counter-intuitively, an art scene ‘thriving like never before’ with new galleries and exhibition openings as well as a growing focus on Ukrainian authors.
It is a scene she has contributed to as part of an imaginative scheme to inspire artists who have been compelled to swap camera or paintbrush for guns and drones by connecting them with artists who can work in safety far from the conflict.
The driving force behind the project, cultural activist Alona Karavai, says: “We wondered how we could help artists who were on the front. We thought, okay, we can help keep alive their sensibility by connecting them using emails, drawings, letters and photographs and encouraging them to work in tandem to create works, however small, however simple.
“The important thing is that the voice of the artists on the front line can still be heard.”
Rehina Bukvuch compiled a photo album for artist-turned-soldier Yevhen Korshunov, a friend from the youthful art scene they shared in Kyiv before the war
When he returns from the action, he will find the album - only three inches by 1.5 - filled with pictures of old friends and warm messages such as ‘Zhenya, warm hugs and a little kiss for you’ sealed with an extravagant smacker. He will be reminded of his peripatetic life on the front line where he is being moved from billet to shabby billet by quirky photographs which he took himself and sent to Bukvuch.
The album speaks of loneliness and dislocation, but it is a reminder of a time neither will forget and a small but eloquent gesture of defiance against the ever present threat of defeat and destruction.
The results of these ‘tandem’ works have been shown in an exhibition at an art centre, Asortymentna Kimnata in the small town of Ivano-Frankivsk, deep in the Carpathian mountains about 350 miles west of Kyiv. The place is also temporary home to 40 IDPs (Internally Displaced Persons) who have the opportunity to join other artists in a fever of creativity, including a display of deceptively colourful paintings by women, most of them amateurs. Deceptive because they are all grieving someone lost in the war.
The album is one of the more low key contributions to the show which is called Do Toads Sing in the Walls? after an artist wrote a song about toads which had settled in the buildings where his unit was stationed. Others are more disturbing.
While recovering from a wound in hospital, Klementyna Kvindt, a drone operator, poet, and ornithologist, complemented her recordings of birdsong with documents, photos, and poems which were collated in a book made of zinc by Olha Babak. Words set against stormy landscapes, or simply on the grey of the metal create a mood which is both eerie and forbidding.
The poems of Yulia Bondar are cries of anguish delivered in a monotone: I bury spring in the black soil / of my barren heart / How many springs lie buried / in this black land? and her words are matched with animated drawings by Mashyka Vyshedska. Hands reach up to bring succour to a woman, only to fade away, flowers briefly bloom and die. A serpent curls around a female torso, leaving behind bloody scars.
The very fact that the works have overcome the constraints of geography and the challenges of communication is in itself a triumph, yet as Karavai, herself an IDP having been forced to flee Donetsk in 2014 when the Russians invaded, acknowledges this kind of grass roots activity will be targeted by the enemy.
“Putin wants to destroy our traditions, our free cultural expression,” she says, but insists that the venture is not merely about promoting national pride.
“It is not about nationalism,” she says. “But more about preserving a culture which is free and democratic. For me, art is a way of existence, of people being together, being fair to each other, and this for me, in a way, is the civilisation which Ukraine is fighting for against Russia. It's not about the Ukrainian nation against the Russian nation, but about one way of living, and art for me, is a part of this way of living. The civilisation we are protecting, is outside the notion of nation.”
That explains why the contributions are more reflective than the ugly images of death and destruction which are horribly routine in newspapers, social media and TV.
It’s a shift recognised by Kateryna Radchenko, curator of the Odesa Photo Days festival, who says: “On February 24, 2022 - literally overnight - every photographer, visual artist, and ordinary citizen with a camera became a documentarian of the war, often without training or proper gear.
“They became witnesses, transforming their cameras into tools to collect evidence of this unjust war, the destruction of cities, architectural heritage, and infrastructure; the bodies of killed civilians; torture and interrogation chambers. They took massive numbers of selfies, firstly to share with their families to show that they were alive and but also to prove to themselves that they were still alive. This focus is a kind of self protection.
“Now it has changed because we have had three years of adaptation, three years of living under the attacks, and artists stopped being afraid and hiding in shelters and started to think more and reflect more by using associations or symbols to describe their feelings and their thoughts rather than direct images.”
Testimony to that change can be seen with the results of a mentoring programme for young people she has helped establish.
“Thousands of kids suffered from the occupation in Mariupol, in Kherson and the attacks on Kharkiv,” she says. “We decided to help them use photography to work through this traumatic experience and also to provide them with the skills to earn money as photographers.”
One of those is Ivan Samoilov who has lived all his 20 years in Kharkiv. After the 2022 invasion he spent two months taking pictures of his hometown. ‘Only rescuers, old people, volunteers and homeless animals maintained some kind of life in the ruined city,’ he says.
His photographs include a lad flexing his muscles on a playground apparatus framed by the ruins of a block of flats behind him, in another, the eye is drawn to a bold flower bed of marigolds before taking in the devastated building behind. Two men on a pedestrian crossing a deserted street, the golden spires of a church catch the sun. As with all the images, the ruined buildings seem almost incidental. Life, after a fashion, goes on.
An essay on volunteers by Artem Baidala, 21, from Dnipro, shows a man concentrating fiercely as he crunches through the rubble carrying materials for construction work on homes hit by missiles, a dachshund trots along before him. Young men take a break with a game of football in a yard. It all looks so normal.
Odesa, with its beaches and noble architecture, has been ravaged by Russian missiles. Tim Melnikov, a 19-year-old student, chronicled the effects of the war on the city with its taped off beaches and piles of sandbags which is now ‘deserted and gloomy, but not broken.’
Radchenko has witnessed a growth in conceptual work, cleverly expressed by Olia Koval, 21, in Memory. A shabby room, sparely furnished with a table, a chair, pictures on the wall, clothes hanging from hooks is transformed in eight frames from rich dark shades to one in which the colour is almost entirely bleached out.
‘Time seems to have sped up after 24 February,’ she writes. ‘Large amounts of information carry you away from where you are. It’s hard to remember what exactly surrounded you.’
And few contributions are as conceptually dauntless as that of Sofia Konovalova, 19, from Kharkiv, who poses nude in a cupboard with a suitcase. In The Place where I Live she captures the oppression that has afflicted her since the invasion. Nevertheless in that claustrophobic confine, life goes on, cleaning teeth, brushing hair, reading a book perched on the suitcase which is packed and waiting to return home, just like her.
Whether it’s a workaday selfie or the ambitious dialogues between artists hundreds of miles apart, the creativity of Ukraine’s young artists is undiminished despite Radchenko’s belief that the world is ‘bored with Ukraine’ - a pessimism she has felt long before Trump and his cohorts abused the ‘dictator’ Zelensky in the White House.
To stir the world from that boredom she has organised a project with Magnum Photos, Beyond the Silence, presented the endeavours of an international array of talent in Lviv.
“The show will help to prove that we are still alive and that we are a different country with a different identity, with our own culture and our own voice, which we want to share, and to make it, like, really loud.”
