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[title]Art happens: it always happens. No matter what society is going through, no matter what tragedies or injustices, artists will create work. And as Ukraine suffers under the relentless Russian invasion, now in its sixth month, the country’s artists are carrying on, creating, making.
Street-art gallery BSMT Space is celebrating that cultural perseverance with an exhibition of young artists from across Ukraine, and pulling it together has required some herculean efforts, including a five-day drive to Lviv.
The show is called ‘Stronger Than Arms’, a reference to an old Ukrainian film about war in the east of the country, and has been entirely curated by two of the gallery’s younger members of staff: Olga Fedorova, who is Russian, and Polina Usenko, who’s Ukrainian.
‘Olga and I were struggling to come to terms with the developing situation between our countries,’ says Polina. ‘I was working on settling my father and his family into their new life in Sussex (they fled my hometown Dnipro in Ukraine on the third day of the war) and the myriad issues which come with a drastic move to a foreign country, as well as just processing the complete and utter shock of the events unfolding. A creative project of this nature was exactly what I think we both needed during what felt like the greatest abyss of our lives so far.’
It’s a sentiment echoed by Olga: ‘For me, being Russian, doing this exhibition is a way to speak up. Before this terrible invasion, these two beautiful countries were deeply connected, but now there’s a huge gap between all of us. Between people, culture and art. My main message to all people and especially to Russians who still support this terrible war is that Ukraine is an absolutely beautiful country, a motherland of talented artists and unique culture, and we need to preserve that, not destroy it.’
The idea of the exhibition is to ‘offer our gallery space to show the work of Ukrainian artists and to cast a light on Ukrainian art and culture which is currently being destroyed and defaced by the Russian propaganda machine’, says Polina. They’ve chosen 13 artists, largely from the world of street art, for an exhibition of graffiti, collage, painting and illustration, filled as much with bright colours as it is with images of war and its devastating impact. Denys Metelin plays on Klimt’s ‘The Kiss’, but the man carries an automatic weapon; Michael Corobcov combines images of missiles with graffitied flowers; Ferosone uses the aesthetics of classic Soviet monumental sculpture.
‘Most of the time, the artists we are showing work directly on to infrastructure and public buildings, and it is uncertain what will happen to that work as this war develops. Vitaliy Greg, who is featured in the exhibition, had a huge mural destroyed by a missile in Mariupol,’ says Polina. But this isn’t necessarily a political show, as Olga says: ‘It’s more about providing a platform for Ukrainian artists and supporting them in such hard times.’
It hasn’t been an easy exhibition to pull together, though. Permits for shipping artwork out of Ukraine have become harder to come by, and since most of the artists are men of serving age, they themselves aren’t allowed to leave the country. Eventually, the only option was for Polina to drive home to Ukraine and pick up the art herself.
‘The drive to Poland was a blur of gas stations, hotdogs, more gas stations and more hotdogs,’ she says. ‘We have become experts in the field of European processed meat.’ She eventually made it to Lviv, where shortly after arriving there was an air raid: ‘I asked some passers-by what I should do but most just smiled and shrugged and said that there was a basement in the school across the road where I could go if I was “that way inclined”, but no one changed their course. It seems that most people, in Lviv at least, have become desensitised to these constant threats by now.’
Against the odds, everyday life in Ukraine is persevering, and now that Polina has managed to get all these works back to London from Lviv, we can see that art – as it always does – is persevering too.
‘Stronger Than Arms’ is at BSMT Space, Aug 17-Sep 4. Free. More details here.