The sound was turned o n to explosions,
and now they listen to Ukrainian voices more closely.
War is the price
Ukraine pays
for being in the spotlight
of the global cultural institutions,
those assigned for shaping art canons,
declaring cultural values,
or condemning ones to oblivion.
Ukraine came out of the shade of empires slowly, laboriously, and painfully.
And now Ukraine has a chance
to get its longed-for agency and the voice of its culture.
Ukrainian artists
have been going their own way;
they have their own scale for times good and bad.
Usually that was the pauses between wars and repressions
when they had their heydays.
Against the odds,
Ukrainian art is naturally woven
into the texture of European culture.
Ukrainian art was kept in a blind zone:
it was always here, and yet invisible.
Ukrainian art
has been speaking out from its side of the transparent and silent wall,
it kept sending a signal of danger.
This Ukrainian Cross-Section
is an overview of what was not heard behind the transparent walls,
what was not seen behind the smoke and mirrors.
That’s an overview of what makes our understanding of ourselves closer
and helps to unfold it to the world
UKRAINE! UNMUTED
Bohdan SHUMYLOVYCH
In 2013, just before the Russian war against Ukraine was launched, people in Kyiv protested against president Yanukovych, whose task was to turn my country into a new Belarus. Clearly, people in Kremlin did not take for granted the collapse of the USSR. They instead considered the events of 1989-1990 as a transition to the revival of the Russian empire. I was born in the USSR and remember this state, so I did not want any ‘wayback situation’ in 2013. In November-December 2013, we were marching in Kyiv or protesting in our native towns, and at the same time, the team of curators from Lviv realized in Lublin (Poland, opened in October), an extensive exhibition of Ukrainian art (designed as Triennale in 2010). I was asked to write a text for a catalog, and the whole situation tempted me to discuss post-Soviet Ukrainian art as post-colonial. From the perspective of 2013, it appeared that in 1993 Ukrainians could not discursively describe their artistic practices of the late 1980s. As if the culture was being located in a post-colonial situation or was similar to a female agent dominated by males and patriarchy, vividly described by Professor Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in a famous essay in 1988. Ukrainian art, I guessed, could not find “its voice” after the collapse of the USSR. Read more
