Feminist Art in post-Soviet Ukraine. Part 2

Zhanna Kadyrova is one of the most famous Ukrainian contemporary artists. In her art, she mostly works with unconventional, brutal media such as concrete, tiles, mounting foam, and bricks. In 2005-2010, she used these materials to create sculptures of garbage items: a crumpled cigarette pack, an apple core, a used teabag. In 2009, Kadyrova created a public sculpture in Shargorod named “Monument to a New Monument,” becoming one of the first Ukrainian artists to engage with urban public spaces. Kadyrova represented Ukraine at the Venice Biennale in 2013 and 2015. She has exhibited widely across the globe, with more than 30 solo shows and more than 130 group shows. 

Since the annexation of Crimea and the following invasion of Ukraine by Russia in 2014, Kadyrova shifted the primary focus of her work towards the war-related themes and the exploration of the impact of war. Some of her latest projects include “Russian Rocket 2022” where she pasted the stickers of Russian missiles on public transport windows across Europe; embroidered pictures from the “Air Raid Alarm”

series; and “Palyanytsya” exhibition in collaboration with Denys Ruban, exhibited at the 59-th biennale in Galleria Continua, featuring sculptures of Ukrainian traditional bread (palyanytsya), crafted from stone. The word “palyanytsya” became one of the main symbols of Ukrainian resistance, as it allowed Ukrainians to distinguish Russian spies on the frontlines during the first months of the full-scale Russian invasion in 2022. All money (a total of €280,000 at the moment of posting) raised from the sale of sculptures within the “Palyanytsya” project is directed to support the needs of the Ukrainian military defenders.

Ksenia Hnylytska is a multi-disciplinary artist from Kyiv who frequently delves into feminist topics in her art. One of her notable video works is “Lifetime Game” (2013-2015), made in collaboration with Alina Yakubenko. The video is presented in a video game format, where the characters, women, must accomplish all of their daily tasks on time in order to receive bonus points. The task list includes numerous chores, such as cooking food, cleaning the house, doing laundry, child care, and grocery shopping. However, this game is a trap: no matter how hard women try to accomplish everything, every day the game starts over, and the points they get for their work are meaningless in the real world. 

Another noteworthy piece by Hnylytska is a calendar she crafted in 2016. Painted in a satirical, figurative manner, the calendar serves as a poignant critique of the political scene of Ukraine, with its patriarchy, oligarchy, and social injustice. At the center of the image is a banquet table with male oligarchs sitting at it. Among the abundance of food and drinks, on the

table lies a naked woman, with sushi arranged on her body like on a dish. In the background, “regular” Ukrainian men are headed to fight in a war, from where they return either in coffins or wheelchairs. The woman on the table smiles, stretching her hand with a rose in it towards the coffins of soldiers. A caption at the top declares, “While in Kyiv ladies promenade, the peasants water soil with their blood.” For Hnylytska, the primary conflict lies in that the lady on the table

appears to be complacent with the unfolding events. Her role is relegated to silently serving the influential men, without paying attention to what’s actually happening in the country. This inert position of a woman is very appropriate for oligarchs, in contrast to women that actively fight for their rights, contribute to defending their country, and stay attentive to political and societal issues.

Lesia Khomenko, originally from Kyiv and now based in New York, works with painting, installation, performance, and video art. She is one of the first Ukrainian artists who began addressing the themes of collective memory and its distortion due to historical inaccuracies implemented by the Soviet and Russian governments. A graduate of Ukrainian Academy of Arts, Khomenko possesses a wide array of artistic skills, allowing her to create complex and impactful critical statements in her works. Her artworks have been discussed by art critics from The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, The Art Newspaper, Frieze, and other influential art media. Khomenko’s artistic interest lies in rethinking the Soviet legacy and juxtaposing its myths with reality, thus unearthing the visual manipulations present in Soviet art. She also focuses a lot on the theme of war. 

In 2013, Khomenko presented a performance at the Karas Gallery in Kyiv, in which she addressed the theme of a woman’s role as a servant in a patriarchal society. During this performance, she stood near the arranged banquet table, wearing a white dress with a long train that extended as the tablecloth upon which the food was arranged. At this position, she appeared to be inseparable from the table and her kitchen slavery. However, on the contrary to Hnylytska’s woman on the table, Khomenko was able to make a slight step aside and disrupt the entire order on the table, liberating herself from this attachment.

Anna Zvyagintseva is a Kyiv-based artist whose oeuvre straddles various forms of drawings, as well as painting, sculpture, installation, and video art, exploring the imperceptible, impalpable facets of life, documenting their fragility and intangibility. She also has a number of works on feminist themes. 

One of Zvyagintseva’s notable feminist pieces is “Fragment” (2013). The work presents a large metal installation, portraying the hands that are washing the dishes. The monumental size of the piece emphasized the importance of this mundane household work, deemed by a society as “feminine.” When looking at the installation from the side, it creates an image of a single line. The installation was accompanied by graphic drawings, expanding the philosophical concept behind it. Zvyagintseva relates to her artistic process as a meditative one, however, she emphasizes that the artist’s work is often underrated by society, just like the housekeeping work done by women. 

Another remarkable feminist project by Anna Zvyagintseva was presented at PinchukArtCentre in Kyiv in 2017. Titled “Misplaced Touches,” this solo exhibition explored the theme of physical boundaries and their violation. The show presented Zvyagintseva’s works in sculpture, installation, graphics, and animation, as well as photos of inappropriate touches in private and social settings found on social media. Instead of depicting the entire bodies, the sculptures in the show portrayed only their parts that succumbed to unwanted touches, such as thighs, knees, shoulders, elbows, and so on. The monumental installation in the show, featuring one of the photos sourced from social media, acted as a delineation line; a border that one crosses when violating someone’s personal freedom and rights.

In 2007, Hrytsya Erde, a multidisciplinary artist from Lviv, presented her project “Females and Egg-laying” across multiple cities in Ukraine. The project included 10 paintings on canvas and 15 graphic drawings portraying women with overweight bodies, asymmetrical features, bald heads, and other physical attributes that aren’t considered conventionally attractive. Through this project, Erde sought to dismantle the prevailing female beauty standards in Ukrainian society at that time and offer a personal, critical perspective on them. 

“In every woman, I can easily see a man, and I can depict it with even more clarity. The masculine dominates so much currently, this androgyny in the extended sense… I want to watch how it manifests itself in women who don’t care about themselves and their bodies, who exist as just females: they go to the market, cook, give birth to children—and they are rough and unattractive. My goal is to show that they are beautiful just as they are, because they are human, and they are great—that’s it.” 

— Hrytsya Erde on “Females and Egg-laying” project

“Only For Men or My Destined Beloved, Show Yourself In The Mirror” by Alevtina Kakhidze can be considered the first feminist performance in Ukrainian art, presented in 2006 with the support of the Soros Centers for Contemporary Art in Kyiv. Through this work, the artist raised a question of the masculine dominance on the Ukrainian art scene. The performance took place in a closed room, the entrance to which was allowed only to men. There, Kakhidze sat silently on a chair, facing a mirror, alluding to a traditional divination practice of waiting for your groom to appear in a mirror, done by Ukrainian women for centuries.

Alina Kopytsia is a Zurich-based Ukrainian artist who mainly works with textile collages, occasionally experimenting with a variety of other mediums and materials. Her artistic focus lies in challenging the stereotypical gender roles, particularly the notions of domination and submission, which she frequently explores within the context of BDSM. 

As part of the “What I Got From a Woman” Ukrainian-Polish joint feminist art exhibition in 2015, Kopytsia presented her “Witness” video, depicting a BDSM session in which the submissive role is enacted by a roped man, while the dominatrix is a woman in burqa. Beyond the sexual context, this work is all about societal and geopolitical roles. Through this video, Alina Kopytsia emphasized the interdependence and reciprocity in the dialectical pair of a slavess and her host / a slave and his hostess.  
Specifically for “What I Got From a Woman” show, Alina Yakubenko, a former R.E.S. member, presented a work titled “Thing.” The installation featured a severed braid alongside printed photos illustrating various hairstyles that the artist had

created with this braid, now functioning as an isolated object, alienated from its owner. The exhibition curator and artist, Oksana Bryukhovetska, noted the resemblance of this work to a child’s play with a doll, emphasizing the performative quality of femininity in a patriarchal society, where the concept of femininity is reduced to separate, objective features that can exist apart from a woman herself.

Oksana Bryukhovetska participated in the show with a work titled “Non-identical Mirroring.” In this work, she attempted to transcend the gender boundaries, dissolving the point between the masculine and the feminine. The photo collage featured an image of a man and a woman who lie together in total surrender and tenderness, in the state between sleep and consciousness. At this moment, they exist outside of the paradigm of their genders—the only thing that matters is the warmth that they sense from one another. This point of warmth creates a sense of total unity and equality between them, turning them into each other’s mirror. However, as mirrors, they don’t copy each other—therefore, this specularity is non-identical: they are still different people, each with their unique and personal perspective on this situation.

Maria Kulikovska is a multidisciplinary artist, architect, actionist-performer, researcher, and lecturer, originally from Kerch, Crimea. Kulikovska explores the theme of a woman’s body through her performative sculptures. By using non-conventional, ephemeral materials such as such as soap, fat, silicone, salt, sugar, caramel, wax, epoxy resin, flowers, sperm, and blood, she illustrates the fragility of a human’s body, the political systems, and the world in general.

One of the most renowned sculpture projects by Kulikovska is the Army of Clones, featuring 20 plaster sculptures casted from her own body. First exhibited in 2010 during the GOGOLFEST festival at Dovzhenko Film Studios, this project is about “the surface of the human body in general, the theme of a skin, the outer covering of the body as the boundary between inside and outside, living and nonliving, as well as the definition of identity” (Oksana Barshynova). On June 9th, 2014, a group of pro-Russian militants in Donetsk destroyed all of the 20 sculptures, exhibited at Izolyatsia Art Centre, by shooting at each of them. A year after this, Kulikovska showed a performance titled Happy Birthday in Saatchi Gallery in London, where she, naked, destroyed the sculptures she created from soap with a hammer, alluding to the destruction of her works by terrorists in Donetsk. 

In 2015, Maria Kulikovska started a long-term feminist and artistic movement titled “Flowers of Democracy,” the aim of which was to illuminate the position of a woman’s body and life in a time of war in Eastern Ukraine. The first action of this movement took place around the building of the “Zhovten” cinema in Kyiv in the summer of 2014. During that action, Kulikovska and other members of the movement hung the plaster vulva’s molds, ”pysanky,” on the fence of the enclosed territory of the cinema building, partially destroyed by fire during the queer movie screening in 2014. The pink vulva became the symbol of the movement, aiming to remove the stigma from the woman’s body and free it from the oppression and limitations imposed by the patriarchal system. 

In 2017, a group of Ukrainian artists prepared an exhibition called The Art of Female Orgasm, sponsored by the Durex company. The show, aimed to address tabooed themes of female orgasm and sex, featuring works by renowned artists such as Nina Murashkina, Maria Kulikovska, Masha Shubina, Tetiana Malinovska, Mykyta Kravtsov, and others, was supposed to be displayed in TSUM in Kyiv. However, the organizers of the show received threats from unknown people, which caused them to cancel the show. 

“The idea for this exhibition wasn’t taken from the air. There is research that shows that 2 out of 3 women don’t orgasm during the sex. Women are mostly regarded as objects that are used for sexual satisfaction of men.” 

— Maria Kulikovska on The Art of Female Orgasm. 

Nina Murashkina, one of the most successful contemporary artists from Donetsk, works with painting, graphics, ceramics, and performance, creating highly erotic and metaphorical art, weaved from her personal sexual and emotional experiences. Her works belong to private collections in Ukraine, China, United States, Japan, Canada, and numerous countries in Europe. Murashkina’s vivid aesthetic is influenced by Ukrainian naive art, Indian and Japanese imagery, as well as ancient mythology. Her goddess-like heroines embody the dual nature of the woman: lustful and innocent, provocative and tender, brutally honest and darkly mysterious. 

Lucy Ivanova is a bright contemporary artist from Dnipro city. A graduate from Dnipro Art College and the National Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture in Kyiv with a degree in painting, Lucy is a bold and ambitious artist who goes far beyond the boundaries of academic art. Although her primary medium is oil painting on cavas, she also experiments with sculpture, video art, photography, environmental art, and textiles. In her paintings, Ivanova mostly portrays simple elements of her everyday surroundings: ordinary objects, mundane scenes from the streets, fragments of her studio and apartment. In 2019, Ivanova had a solo exhibition in The Naked Room gallery in Kyiv titled “The Thing Is Not in Itself”—an allusion to the concept of thing-in-itself created by German philosopher Immanuel Kant. According to Kant, the thing-in-itself is the

status of an object as it is, independent from human observation and perception. Ivanova’s “Thing Is Not in Itself” is about things that compose her inner world, her personality as a human and an artist—therefore, from her perspective, they cease to exist outside of these roles in her life. 

“I went through a crisis of liberating painting from its mission. It no longer needs to owe anything to anyone. I came to the realization that painting possesses inherent meaning, that it is a statement in and of itself,” says Lyusya Ivanova about her art.

Tetiana Malinovska is a multidisciplinary artist, independent curator, and mother of five children. As an artist, she explores the themes of self-identification, self-consciousness, and the transience of one’s existence in society. She works with oil painting, ink, embroidery, media, and video art. Since 2005, Malinovska has been working in collaboration with her husband, Ukrainian artist Artem Volokitin. In 2007, she co-founded VM Art Studio, an independent creative studio and art space. In 2019, she represented Ukrainian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Her exhibition history includes more than 50 solo and group shows in Ukraine, Poland, Vienna, the USA, France, and Italy. Her paintings belong to private and public collections in Ukraine, Europe, the UK, the Americas, and India.

Oksana Mas is a globally renowned multidisciplinary artist from Odessa, currently based in Spain. She works with more than 20 galleries worldwide, with her art selling at Sotheby’s, Christie’s, and Phillips auctions. Her works are associated with relational art, neo-expressionism, painting revival of the 90’s, digital art, and science art. Through a wide variety of mediums, Mas explores the themes related to the metaphysical: spiritual and physical, space and matter. 

“Altar of Nations,” first shown at 54th Venice Biennale in 2011, is one of the most famous and monumental works by Oksana Mas. This eight-story-building-size installation is made from 3480000 wooden eggs painted by people of 50 different nationalities, each egg depicting a personal sin of its creator. This impressive composition, created with a reference to Ghent Altarpiece, is a testament to the deep connection between all humans, showing that we all have the same origin and the common ground of the sin. The egg, in many cultures, including Ukrainian, is a symbol of birth and beginning. The Ghent Altarpiece is considered the beginning of the European Renaissance, which is also a symbol of creation and rebirth. Through this project, Mas declared that each of us is capable of rising above the time and returning to our past in order to acknowledge our sins and take important lessons that we can bring into our future.

“In the foundation of Mas’s creativity lies a principle that forms the basis of existence – the principle of interpenetration and fusion of matter, which is in a state of constant decay.”
— Achille Bonito Oliva, Italian art critic and historian, one of the leading contemporary art experts. 

Masha Reva is a multidisciplinary artist and creative director, born in Odessa and currently based in Kyiv. With a background in fashion design, Reva works at the intersection between contemporary and applied art, fashion, performance, set design, and art direction. She has numerous successful collaborations behind her back, including Jacquemus (France), Pepsi Co (US), Rachel Comey (US), Rijksmuseum (Amsterdam), and Royal Opera House in the UK. Reva creates her graphic works on paper, ceramics, textiles, metal, jewelry, walls, and on human bodies. 

The themes of body and embodiment hold a special place in Reva’s art. In the “Kyiv Kids” project in 2016, she painted her first impressions of people on their bodies, and the photographer Armen Parsadanov then captured their portraits. In 2018, she presented a fashion collection in Paris that featured painted lines on human bodies. 

Masha Shubina, a multidisciplinary artist and designer from Kyiv, creates bright and provocative works that explore a diverse range of themes, spanning from the globally significant to the intimately personal.

At the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022, Shubina presented a project titled “Lost&Found/Silent_Sky,” showcasing works she created in response to the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine. By combining Ukrainian traditional rushnyks (embroidered towels) with paintings of tanks, helicopters, and fighter jets, she effectively brought attention to the cultural context of wartime Ukraine. 

Before the full-scale Russian invasion in 2022, Shubina primarily centered her artistic practice on more intimate, self-reflective themes. She is an author of numerous self-portraits, composing a series titled “Self-identification”—a long-term exploration of her own personality. 

“The boundless possibilities of the future increasingly and rigidly constrain the desires of today.”

— Masha Shubina.

Katya Buchatska belongs to the group of artists who often represent Ukraine at important cultural events abroad. Based in Kyiv, she works with video art, installation, photography, and painting. Her artistic interests include the themes of time and space, intimate feelings, personal experiences, and cycles of life. 

In 2023, Buchatska presented the “Izyum to Liverpool” solo project in Liverpool, commissioned by Culture Liverpool in partnership with Liverpool Cathedral for the Eurovision Cultural Festival 2023. This 12-channel, 14-hour video installation shows a train journey from liberated Izyum in eastern Ukraine to Mostyska, right near the border with Poland. Filmed in real time, this video shows the journey of escape many Ukrainians have taken since the Russian full-scale invasion in February 2022.

“The artwork exposes the instability of the environment—the imminent threat may not always be visible; however, its presence is palpable. To ensure the safety of train passengers, carriage windows are covered with transparent tape to protect travelers from possible shockwave blasts from explosions. During filming, the tape was temporarily removed from all but one window, and some shots are pixelated to strategically hide Ukrainian outposts. After sunset, scenes fall into darkness as Ukraine is still poorly lit at night. To accompany the work, an intermittent soundscape was created by generative algorithms from recordings taken during the filming of the footage.‍Izyum to Liverpool reflects on the fragility of the environment, and of life in Ukraine. Whilst considering feelings of loss, uncertainty, and displacement; it also displays the resilience of the Ukrainian people.” (Source: katyabuchatska.me) 

“Not always was it pleasant to feel that you are interesting to people only because there is a war going on in your country.”

— Katya Buchatska on the “Izyum to Liverpool” show.