The decolonisation of memory and being through art entails restoring the right and capacity of the artist and viewer to make their own choices about what to remember and how to remember it; to understand who they are and why they have been thrown into this world.
Madina Tlostanova, “A Leap into the Void”, 2020.
Russian cultural and political elites have for centuries assured the world that the peoples who were once part of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union should be perceived under the common umbrella of Russian culture. At the same time, they have destroyed language, leveled heritage, rewritten history, and appropriated the achievements, resources, culture and art of the ‘non-titular’ nations. And until recently, it was normal for the ‘former Western empires’, including modern Germany, the US, France and the UK, to accept Russian dominance over these peoples and territories and to look favorably on the Russian vision of them. All empires seek appropriation, homogenization, assimilation and domination. That is why Western imperialism speaks the same language as Russian imperialism, and the voices of people outside the world centers of power are almost never heard.
The deep rootedness of these imperialist and colonizing positions in the complex architecture of knowledge results in what is known as ‘epistemic violence’. According to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, the Indian-American scholar who coined the term in the 1980s, epistemic violence occurs through the marginalization of certain voices in Western discourses, when non-Western epistemologies are dismissed as inadequate, ‘underdeveloped’ and naive, and the dominant Western narrative aims to change the historical and social consciousness of local peoples, to remove all traces of the original and overwrite it with something more suitable [1 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can Subalterns talk?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, eds. Lawrence Grossberg and Cary Nelson (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), pp. 271-313.]. The Ukrainian voice was marginalized in this way both in Western discourses and in the discourses of the Eastern empire — both forces with substantial control over knowledge frameworks shaped the perception of Ukrainians as ‘Others’ [2 Spivak uses the concept of discourse in Michel Foucault’s sense, that is, as a system of thought, knowledge or communications that construct our experience of the world. Because control over discourse equals control over how the world is perceived, social theory often studies discourse in close relation to power.]. That is to say, epistemic violence is violence exercised against or through knowledge and is a key element of any process of domination. Or, as Enrique Galván-Alvarez mentions: “It is not only through the construction of exploitative economic links or the control of the politico-military apparatuses that domination is accomplished, but also and, I would argue, most importantly through the construction of epistemic frameworks that legitimize and enshrine those practices of domination”[3 Enrique Galván-Álvarez, “Epistemic Violence and Retaliation: The Issue of in ‘Mother India’”, in Atlantis, Vol. 32, No. 2 (December, 2010), p. 12.]. Edward Said, in his 1978 masterpiece Orientalism, showed with extreme clarity how these frameworks of knowledge that belittles and subordinates the ‘Other’ are constructed through the language, discourse, attitude and vision of respected writers, intellectuals and researchers. Unfortunately, the result of this type of violence is that the knowledge and perceptions created to dominate and subjugate us sometimes become so ingrained in our own culture, beliefs and being, so overriding the real experience and memory of our people, that for them it is difficult to navigate who they really are.
But what is happening now with the world’s unprecedented attention to Ukraine? Have the constructed Russian lenses on Ukrainian culture, history, and art, which the West has shared so well, suddenly shattered? Do we now speak for ourselves without any outside interference? Have we managed to find our voice, our subjectivity, and finally become visible and unmuted to the world?
It is clear that a major upheaval is taking place today, not only in the world order of power, but also in the established structures of knowledge. The Russian voice is losing control over the representation of the Ukrainian people, while Western researchers, some for the first time, are discovering Ukrainian art, culture and history. Ukraine is for them an entirely new subject and still a blind spot on their research maps, an unknown territory inhabited by fantastic and somewhat exoticized braves who continue to defeat the West’s centuries-old and respected partner in imperialism. As for the Ukrainians themselves — having taken responsibility not only for their own but also for the future of the entire democratic world, they no longer so gullibly accept the Eurocentric myth about themselves as ‘not real Europeans’ who need to endlessly modernize and ‘catch up’ in order to be considered equal someday (read ‘never’). The persistence of our people in the struggle for their land and independence, the clarity of their positions and the precision of their demands to the global community testify to the birth of the Ukrainian voice, which so unexpectedly, but so obviously destroys the outdated frameworks of knowledge and distorted perceptions of Ukrainians that have been elaborated and implemented by both the West and Russia for centuries.
Meanwhile, Western institutions and research centers are really trying to catch up — urgently getting to know Ukraine in order to understand how the world is changing. As for the cultural and artistic sphere, almost all museums and art venues have already made their space available for discussions, film screenings, and exhibitions of Ukrainian art. Unfortunately, most of these attempts do not structurally change the global knowledge/ power equilibrium, as they are often sporadic and ill-conceived, do not initiate long-term research and cooperation programs with Ukraine, and do not seek to produce new knowledge that might change the existing order of things. The problem also that decolonial studies in Ukraine are still in their infancy, and Ukrainian researchers still lack their own decolonial terminology and independently built knowledge structures to thoroughly analyze the cultural and historical situation of their people [4 Decoloniality is a school of thought that focuses on liberating knowledge production from a predominantly Eurocentric episteme. It mostly criticizes the universality of Western knowledge and the domination of Western culture, considering this hegemony as the basis of Western imperialism. Decoloniality is also called a form of ‘epistemic disobedience’ or ‘epistemic de-linking’ (Walter D. Mignolo). Today, the ideas of decoloniality are widely used to analyze Eastern European and other post-communist contexts, taking into account their cultural and historical particularities and the influence of hybrid Soviet or socialist modernity.]. Many attempts to speak for themselves demonstrate the chaos of self-understanding that is often cloaked in populism. Accordingly, there is a danger that such a shallow exploration of the Ukrainian issue can soon reduce it to a superficial everyday occurrence and deprive it of today’s radical charge.
At the same time, there is no doubt that at this moment in history we have a unique chance to reshape the established frameworks of knowledge. This process has been launched, but it still requires great effort, first and foremost from Ukrainians themselves. In a country at war, culture and art, research and self-understanding are perhaps not at the forefront. The liberation of the occupied territories and the timely supply of weapons seem to be the most important. However, it is specifically art and culture, and understanding the knowledge/power relationships, in particular how they are being shaped and how we can intervene in it, are key to gaining our voice and subjectivity.
To achieve this, we have to understand ourselves to the smallest detail, to the last millimeter and pixel, analyzing under a magnifying glass the states of mind, feelings, muted traumas and erased memories of the Ukrainian people. In other words, we must know ourselves in order to be able to speak, to be unmuted. Many Ukrainian researchers and writers, including Darya Tsymbaliuk, Svitlana Biedarieva, Asia Bazdyrieva and others, are already working successfully in this direction. But Ukrainian artists do the subtlest work in this terrain. After all, as Madina Tlostanova notes, “only through allegories, symbols and metaphors is it still possible to tell an alternative version of events”, because “metaphorical artistic expressions are strangely more effective than bare facts as they call directly to our emotions and sensibilities, thus launching a painful process of existential liberation” [5 Madina Tlostanova, “Decolonial AestheSis and the Post-Soviet Art”, in Afterall. A Journal of Art Context and Enquiry (September 2019), p. 104.].
The Ukrainian artists whose works presented in the project Ukraine! Unmuted extremely clearly capture the current pain points of Ukrainian society and emotionally draw the viewers into them, which leads to the transformation of views, evokes empathy and helps Ukrainians to better understand themselves and be understood by the international community. This is exactly what each work of this year’s edition of the Triennial of Ukrainian Contemporary Art Ukrainian Section strives for.
Endangered Living
For example, the video Peace and Tranquillity (2022), directed by Myro Klochko and Anatoliy Tatarenko and based on the play of the same name by Andrii Bondarenko, reveals the connection between the traumatic experiences of violence and survival that almost every Ukrainian family has experienced in several generations. Our current existence in the midst of real war has suddenly revealed to us an understanding of a seemingly distant injustice so clearly imprinted in the bodies and minds of our parents, grandparents, and great- grandparents. We now realize that war and instability have long been part of who we are. Has this war, at all, ever ended?
Sergiy Petlyuk’s immersive video installation When the Fog Clears (2018) explores the theme of insecurity, placing the viewer’s body in a space of instability and deprivation of personal boundaries. By associating themselves with naked human bodies that are alternately projected onto walls and trying in vain to avoid a beam of light directed at them, the audience tries on the role of a fragile and unprotected target. The work, created in 2018, evokes a new response today, when many have experienced a sense of helplessness before the war machine that so brutally penetrates our bodies, minds, homes, lives and lands.
There are also artists who reflect on methods of psychological adaptation to war conditions. In Kostiantyn Zorkin’s sculptural objects under the generic title Protective Layer (2022), reminiscent of wilted tree leaves and war-ravaged houses, the material, namely rusted metal, has a double metaphor of both protection and weapons of capital destruction. During war, the illusion of security is constantly replaced by the fear of irreversible loss, of death. It is that state of in/security in which one hopes to be protected, but at every moment expects to be wounded.
From Healing to Solidarity and Resistance
The artists not only immerse the viewer in the traumatic experience of Ukrainian history and contemporary fragility of everyday life, but also offer an arsenal of healing methods that range from therapeutic work with trauma to solidarity and resistance to narratives of violence and subjugation.
For instance, the work of Lia Dostlieva and Andrii Dostliev Licking War Wounds (2016–2021) reflects on the experience of Ukrainians from Donbas who survived the occupation back in 2014. People from peaceful regions of Ukraine did not fully understand what war was at that time. This work reminds us that war needs to be experienced together with those who are in the conflict zone, taking it as our own everyday reality, otherwise it will come to your home sooner or later. The tank, as a symbol of trauma, is placed on a pedestal and under a glass display case, like in a museum. Artists erase its contours by licking off the salt it is made of. The healing of any trauma is an almost invisible process, but compulsive — one that requires numerous repetitions in personal histories.
Moving from healing to resistance, we should mention the series of watercolor paintings by Kateryna Lysovenko (2022). Depicting delicate, vulnerable and sometimes mythical human images that seem to be detached from the brutal reality or successfully contrast with it, the artist encourages the viewer to an incredible emotional insight. The translucency of the watercolor conveys the subtlety and vulnerability of human matter. And the seeming fragility and weakness of the naked body parts, children and women are used to send a persuasive political message.
Katya Libkind, in her painting entitled A Woman Smiles, a Woman Takes, a Woman Gives Birth. Oval (2021), also uses the image of women and a child, but they are not vulnerable here, instead they have a decisive character. The very title of the work contains a confident and imperative determination to action. What matters here is the facilitation and support, group cohesion around an action that bears the highest value — life. Isn’t that how the Ukrainian voice is being born now? In turn, Stanislav Turina’s series of drawings Thank You (2014-2022) is the quintessence of something essential, of what one person can give to another, — from food, support, understanding to shelter and love. It is also a priceless connection between people and gratitude for what we share — a moment, an experience, a country. And, it is that solidarity, interdependence and belonging, without which Ukraine would not have survived.
Mixed and Unclear
There are also artists who reflect on Ukraine’s rather complex, heterogeneous and somewhat fragmented cultural, architectural and industrial heritage, which certainly affects Ukrainians’ self-understanding and identity.
Thus, Viacheslav Poliakov, in his photo project ı.|.ı 2022 (2022), combines natural elements, such as land, plants and fruits, with remnants of daily human activity, including objects of mass culture and ideologies. It is as if disjointed scraps of different empires, political and cultural currents are mingled with the everyday life of ordinary Ukrainians and their land. This strangely correlates with today’s visual representation of the war — a crude chaos of building rubble, dead bodies and abandoned household items. The total and senseless destruction and devaluation of human life is a heavy signature of the outgoing empire. All this opens up a new perspective on the work of the artist who has long worked with the theme of cultural chaos, aimless destruction, deterioration and dismemberment.
The art collective Fantastic Little Splash (Lera Melchenko and Oleksandr Hants), in their video research CONCRETE AND UNCLEAR (2019), analyses the architectural legacy left by the Soviet Union in many Ukrainian cities, in particular in Dnipro. The project of Soviet modernity suggests large and powerful architectural and industrial forms that do not care about human comfort, the main thing of them is an impressive appearance. These images- symbols like old skin have long since disappeared from our sense of self, but are still strongly present in our cities, in our lives. The way people remake the perception and use of them is explored by the art collective on the example of the emormous Parus Hotel, which, as the whole project of Soviet modernity that promised a bright future, has never been completed [6 In decolonial studies, ‘modernity’ is considered as an epistemological framework that is inextricably linked to the European colonial project. Soviet modernity is a hybrid subtype of European modernity.].
In video installation Ukrainians: The People Who Cannot Go Home (2018), Nikolay Karabinovich explores the transformation of traditions, patriotic images and feelings disconnected from their context of origin through a combination of dance and music and through personal stories of Ukrainian immigrants in Manchester. Their national identity is blurred and blended with the local way of life. The image of the Ukrainian immigrant presented by the artist corresponds to the voice of the postcolonial subjects, who are embedded in constructed, mythical and imagined stories about themselves, only partly knowing who they really are.
Structural Violence
Some artists work directly or indirectly with the theme of structural violence. This type of violence is a consequence of unjust and unequal social and economic structures and manifests itself, for example, in poverty and deprivation of basic resources and access to rights. Artistic reflections on this subject range from the global to the local, from the personal to the social.
For example, Pavlo Makov, in his work Mappa Mundi (2020-2021), imagines a kind of global communal space. The work consists of a large wooden object and a drawing hanging on the wall — both are plans of a strange floor in an imaginary building. It is a kind of collective space where some zones are clearly delineated in bold pencil, where many boundaries are marked with only dotted lines, where some own too much and others almost nothing, where there is no comfort and where everything is interconnected. The war in Ukraine, because of its interrelatedness with many global processes, has once again exposed this discomfort and intimacy, and once again demonstrated the drama and injustice of world inequalities.
These inequalities develop not only in the global arena, but also in the local context through the deprivation of the rights of minority groups, be it the LGBT community, the poor, or national minorities, especially the Roma. A bridge of compassion and support needs to be built across such a wall, which is very difficult not only for a long-suffering post-Soviet society like that of Ukraine, but also for quite wealthy and stable societies in the West. But this bridge is the key to social well-being, security and high value of human life, which we all so much dream of. And this is exactly the kind of bridge the artist Sasha Kurmaz builds simply by capturing its double in a photo (Bridge, public intervention, 2019). Although his bridge is wooden, temporary and unstable, it still leads a person over a solid concrete wall. Will this wall ever be completely destroyed?
At the same time, Yana Bachynska, in her video My Grandfather’s Skin (2020), speaks through a very personal story of her family about the structural violence that is deeply rooted in post-Soviet man and is still maintained by many state and social institutions. The Soviet upbringing was built on subordination, conformism and humiliation. This clearly provokes violence, especially against the most vulnerable — women and children. To get rid of the ‘Russian world’ mentality completely, we need to work on this ‘legacy’ in ourselves. It is that old skin of our Soviet ancestors that is so heavy and needs to be taken off.
Voiced Earth of Ukraine
Some artists featured in the exhibition appeal to the theme of the earth/land/Earth and try to show the importance of the voice of non-human actors. That is to say, their projects are a direct or indirect critique of anthropocentrism [7 ‘Anthropocentrism’ is an unscientific idealistic view, according to which a human being is the center of the universe and the goal of all events taking place in the world.]. Indeed, the human world is so egocentric and corrupted that people’s ideas and intentions for a better living are either deepened into utopia or opened up to terrifying dystopia, such as wars and the climate crisis. It seems that humans need to step back, as we are blind in our aggression and greed. Perhaps it is better to follow the logic of plants, animals and earth/Earth. And to create a new reality where humans are not the center of the universe and non-human are not seen as mere objects of subjugation and exploitation, which has been promoted in ideas of ‘modernity/coloniality’ [8 ‘Modernity/coloniality’ is a concept first used by Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano (1930-2018) and later developed by Argentine decolonial theorist Walter D. Mignolo. In decolonial studies, modernity and coloniality are inseparable, two sides of the same coin. Thus, Mignolo argues that coloniality is the dark side of Western modernity, a complex matrix of power that has been created and controlled by Western people and institutions, from the Renaissance, when it was guided by Christian theology, to today’s dictates of neoliberalism. More in: “The Darker Side of Western Modernity. Global Futures, Decolonial Options” (Duke University Press, 2011).] over the past centuries, but rather perceived as partners-subjects with a legally protected voice [9 The idea of building a new form of collectivity, in which human and non-human actors can coexist on an equal footing, was carefully developed by the French philosopher, anthropologist and sociologist Bruno Latour (1947-2022) in his numerous works, especially in the book “Politics of Nature. How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy” (Harvard University Press, 2004), which laid the conceptual framework of political ecology.]. In other words, Ukrainian artists are acutely aware that now, in the light of catastrophic climate change and wars, it is more critical than ever how humans relate to the non-human world, because it has a direct bearing not only on how they ultimately relate to each other, but also on whether humanity will exist at all in the foreseeable future.
This is what Alevtina Kakhidze bears in mind when researching the living strategies of plants in her project Invasions (2022). The artist argues that the way plants relate to each other is a prime example of pacifism. They too have confrontations and invasions of alien plants, but they do not kill each other in seconds and do not flee from the place where they took root. The logic of plants is something that humans should have learnt.
The artistic duo of Daniil Revkovskiy and Andriy Rachinskiy, in the project Tailings Dam (2021), gives voice to the places of human activity where the land is subjugated through its alteration and organization for human needs, including cemeteries and large-scale Soviet industrial infrastructure. They think of a future museum of human civilization that will emerge after people’s extinction, where only strange artifacts and incomprehensible messages will remain, or perhaps only clanking, hammering, dispute and gurgling. Artists use voice and body as tools of dissent and rebellion as well as care, solidarity and compassion. When we mutter, speak or shout, stutter or remain silent, we define the nature of our presence in relation to others — humans and non-humans.
Artist Zhanna Kadyrova also addresses the viewer through symbolic objects of the inanimate world. She uses the image of the traditional Ukrainian wheat bread ‘palianytsia’ in her project of the same name (Palianytsia, 2022). This word itself has become a key symbol of Ukrainianness since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. It consists of a complex combination of soft and hard sounds that is difficult for a Russian-speaker to pronounce correctly. Oddly enough, but only with the beginning of the war we discovered that Ukraine feeds half the world with its wheat, and its long-suffering land will determine whether humanity will starve or not. The artist’s installation is made of stones she found in the Ukrainian Carpathian Mountains. Sliced loaves of stone bread lie on a table covered with a snow-white tablecloth. This pure white tablecloth hints at a lack of context, or rather an unwillingness to know the background of the bread you are eating. Is the Ukrainian land, which is used and exhausted to feed the world, which is shelled and bombed daily, which contains fragments of different civilizations and cultures, finally finding its voice and becoming visible?
The curatorial project by Vlodko Kaufman, called Earth (2022), stands apart from the rest. This installation was created in collaboration with several artists, including Yana Krykun, Natalia Lisova, Maksym Mazur, Sergiy Radkevych, Serhiy Savchenko, Natalka Shymin and Oleksandr Dovzhenko (1894-1956). The artists’ works are combined with each other, which creates polyphony of voices that resound from old telephone booths, as if from portals. Each of the works is an attempt to understand what the ‘earth/land’ is for Ukrainians, who die for it, eat its fruits, and find their shelter on it. Here, ‘earth/land’ is a metaphor for the constant anxiety to lose it, an abstract territory on the map, the borders of which are regularly redrawn, and a target before the invader, for whom it is just an object for extractivism. But the most important thing the project reveals is the special bond Ukrainians have with their land, which is based on a deep emotional and physical rooting in every bit of it. It is this relationship to land that makes Ukrainians Ukrainians and is able to give it a real subjectivity.
Listening to all these voices of Ukrainian artists, we can see the subtle level at which they work with the decolonisation of memory and knowledge, the decolonisation of feelings and being. It is that study of the self in pixels and millimetres that not only heals the wounds after a long-term dependency, but also helps us to recover the historical truth about ourselves, or in Madina Tlostanova’s words, to restore the right and ability to choose what and how to remember. This kind of self-awareness and understanding of why we were thrown into this world is the main prerequisite for building a new framework of knowledge and inventing our own words that will allow us to speak for ourselves.
But to successfully confront the ‘colonial matrix of power’ (Aníbal Quijano), which is the ‘darker side’ of both Soviet and Western modernities, the efforts of artists and individual researchers are not enough. There is a need to develop a local branch of decolonial research based on academic and scientific infrastructure, as well as to make political elites understand this issue so that they can pursue appropriate cultural policies. First and foremost, Ukrainian statesmen need to understand that their policy of decommunization does not amount to decolonization, since eradicating visual Soviet symbols and renaming streets and cities only outlines the problem, but does not significantly change anything inside us. In other words, decommunization does not heal our ‘colonial wound’, which, without being fully understood and analyzed, constantly reopens and bleeds. Insdead, decolonization, according to its key theorist Walter D. Mignolo: “is at once the unveiling of the wound and the possibility of healing. It makes the wound visible, tangible; it voices the scream” [10 Walter Mignolo and Rolando Wazquez, “Decolonial AestheSis: Colonial Wounds/Decolonial Healings”, in Social Text (July 2013), consulted October 10, 2022, https://socialtextjournal.org/periscope_article/decolonial-aesthesis-colonial-woundsdecolonial-healings/].
This is exactly what the artists of this exhibition do: through feelings, emotions and sensations they allow us to reach an embodied consciousness of our ‘colonial wound’, and this brings us closer to the desired healing and strengthens the confidence that Ukrainians are the people who CAN go home. Home in this case does not mean the imaginary pure culture that we allegedly once had and of which we were cruelly deprived by the colonial powers. No. Home is mindfulness and understanding of ourselves; responsibility for our own past, present and future; and the path to a more healed state of our minds and souls — all of these together form the ability to speak and be unmuted.