russianfull-scale war against Ukraine2022-now

related works and projects

The artwork shows the town of Kakhovka flooded with water after the collapse of the Kakhovka River Dam on 6 June 2023.

Dnipro River is deeply intertwined with Ukrainian heritage. It is portrayed as being damaged and distorted by the horrors of war yet remaining a resilient and powerful natural force.

A Modern Landscape was made in early March 2022, as an expression of the first emotional response to the russian full-scale invasion and missile attacks over Ukraine. This is how the life, the world looked like to me at the time, in the first shock of war.

The artwork...

The artwork is a collective impression of a series of images depicting the resilience of Ukrainian defenders facing any and every adversity. Mainly, the artwork is derived from the image of Dmytro Kozatsky standing under a ray of sunlight in the besieged Azovstal in Mariupol in May 2022.

The artwork speaks about the complex tragedy of losing one's home, physically or mentally, in an accentuatedly simple image.

There is a duality in photographs (or view from the car window) of the half-destroyed houses, fallen rooftops, dark glassless windows and craters in the courtyards. They are direct and explicit, similar to one another; yet, when I see an image like that, my thoughts are always drawn to the depth of the empty rooms and the invisible stories of lives that had been lived in them.

Several of my works speak about a sense of home, safety, belonging being destroyed by the war. This artwork is about attempts to preserve if not home, then at least image of it through memories and emotional connections in the chaos and ruins the war has brought.

To me, one of the biggest themes in the piece is also the effort placed into keeping connections within the family during times when you feel most distanced from each other.

In a somehow distortedly romanticised way, it is fascinating to see footage from the buildings after a missile attack with a single piece of furniture or maybe tableware, even less likely to survive, hanging or standing there on the edge of the ruins, seemingly unharmed. To me, it resonated with the time when my little cousin called us, saying there was an explosion nearby, but they weren't injured, so everything was fine. The fragile glass surviving a massive attack becomes an allegory to the Ukrainian people, withstanding the chaos and destruction around them.

I associate embossed coloured wine glasses with warm and happy holiday family dinners. In connection with the previous piece, this artwork continues the narrative of the preservation of the home.

The artwork was made to bring attention to the atrocities, committed by russian forces during the occupation of the Kyiv region in the Spring of 2022, which were discovered after the liberation of the area.