Defined by silence

Despite the fact that these days, so much is being said, shown, and written about Ukraine and the war that Russia waged on her; despite all the news, numerous interviews and videos of President Zelensky speaking to whoever is willing to listen; despite constant buzz in the Ukrainian segments of social media where people coordinate humanitarian help, support to the territorial defense units, the relocation of people, and million other urgent matters; despite all these the inner condition, the state of being of the country is probably best defined by the word ‘silence.’ 

Silence can stem from different circumstances and possess various qualities. It can be voluntary or forced, deafening or revealing, powerful or paralyzing. What unites all these is absence as an antonym to presence; the absence of something that could have been but is not. This silence in Ukraine in the middle of murderous noise is the absence of the words, expressions, thoughts, actions, intentions that could have been said, stated, done, shown, uttered if there was no war.

Silence also does not necessarily mean the absence of people, quite the contrary – the more people whose voices have been silenced, the more deafening and horrible it grows. This is especially true when talking about culture: Ukrainian culture today is a void compiled of empty spaces that could have been filled with books, exhibitions, performances that did not happen –  and most probably, will not happen for a long time.

Kinder Album: Ukrainian Titans Holding Up the Sky. 2022, published on Instagram. Image courtesy of the artist Kinder Album.

Back in 2014, at the de facto onset of the current invasion – occupation of Crimea and the war in Eastern Ukraine, –  the outstanding Ukrainian writer Oksana Zabuzhko switched from her writing  to producing endless interviews and articles, predominantly for western media. She called it ‘getting into a tank’ – an expression which later became a title for her collection of essays and interviews.

Yet again, everything was brought to a halt on 24 February this year, but on much larger and more terrifying scale. 

This time another outstanding Ukrainian writer, Sofia Andruchovych wrote: ‘Before the war, I was a writer. Today, on the ninth day, I feel unable to string two words together’. 

Film director Marina Stepanska stated on her Facebook in A Letter from Ukraine: ‘I used to be a filmmaker, now I’m not.’

Meanwhile, artist Lesya Khomenko left everything in her studio in Kyiv and took to Ivano-Frankivsk in Western Ukraine with her daughter, and started a lab for displaced artists. She calls it ‘a therapeutic space’ to look at the current situation and try to deal with it through collaborative work. She says, ‘We left all our works behind, we are left with nothing, without a biography. When some might have their works digitalized, others like myself have only material pieces.’

So, what are the voices of the silence? What happens to art (and artists) during the war? The question is twofold. One problem is what happens instead of art that did not happen. The other: what happens to art that already happened.

The art that already happened

A few days after the war started, globalmedia picked up the story of Maria Prymachenko’s works being destroyed as a local history museum burned down after missile hit in Ivankiv, near Kyiv. The story went viral spreading from arts magazines and newspapers to mainstream media: colorful phantasmagoric images of Prymachenko’s imagined flora and fauna covering printed pages and newsletters. 

Shortly after, thenews surfaced that some of the paintings may have been saved by locals – maybe even more than those destroyed. It is worth noting that the main collection of her works was stored elsewhere in the first place. Yet, this information never made it to the top headlines, and neither did the news about the destroyed or severely damaged museums in Kharkiv, Mariupol, or Chernihiv. 

A powerful visionary painting by Maria Primachenko: May That Nuclear War Be Cursed! 1978. Fair Use via Wikiart.

Was this information simply swallowed by the tsunami of other news? Lost among the daily reports of children being killed, civilians kept hostage, whole cities destroyed? Maybe people simply more important than artworks, allowing the threat to lives overshadowing the problem of cultural heritage? It may have been affected by  the authorities’ reinforced demand not to publish any visuals and not to disclose the locations of the missile hits and destruction? 

Or was this silence already internalized and accepted? Did museum workers and cultural professionals remain silent because they understood that any information about the collections, their whereabouts, their conditions or further prospects equaled putting a target on them?

On the other hand, the uproar about the destruction of Prymachenko’s works might have concentrated on something other than the artist, or even the works. It might have been another omission created by the war, a tangible example of loss when  destruction was the only story to tell. 

In war, the materiality of destruction prevails over the materiality of existence. The physical pressure and the finite mass of the rubble left after the missile hits a building feels like the end of the sentence. All said. Period. Nothing can be done. Time to move on. 

But those who survive, be they people or objects, need their stories and histories. Without them, Prymachenko stays a ‘folk’ artist whose works appeared on postal stamps, was awarded an art prize (notably, both these happened still under the Soviet Union), and was praised by Picasso.  These little scraps of info were mentioned all over international media. 

In this context, her unique story as an autodidact who never left her village, her cosmovisions of interconnectedness of life that blurred the borders between the reality and dreams, the role of her works for the generations of Ukrainian artists and in forging Ukrainian cultural identity have no place and no attention. In the place where a story should be told, there is silence.

Even more silence occupied places of stories that could have been told. Museum collections are stored in basements in undisclosed locations,: and museum directors refuse to talk about the specifics; activists raise funds and collect basic necessities to support the people who save the artworks. Grassroots initiatives like the Museum Crisis Center provide packaging material and fire extinguishers, prioritizing museums in small towns and villages. These objects of varying value, origin, and provenance,are parts of a cultural heritage that would need to be exhibited, contextualized and analyzed, woven into the complex history of a country whose people were deprived of history for a long time. But right now, security prevails over the need of storytelling.

And then there are the artworks of living artists too, left in studios and galleries basements, sometimes rescued by volunteers or fellow artists, sometimes already lost forever.

The art that did not happen

If some of these works are never to be recovered, what does it make them? Will they be merely a ‘lost biography’, in Lesya Khomenko’s words? Are they an already lost heritage? And what’s the difference? When and if the images, the digital copies of these works are to be exhibited sometime in the future, how will the present, material objects created by the same artists during the war look next to them? Perhaps, there will be a note, a small caption next to each of them saying something like ‘This work was not the one planned by the artist or created out of her/his good will. It was created by the war.’ 

Alevtina Kakhidze is one of the artists to document her experiences since the second day of the war, utilizing her vast international recognition and  network all over Europe and in Russia. In her first war drawings – the first pages in her ongoing visual diary published on her Facebook page –, Alevtina tried to call on Russian artists and intellectuals to take to the streets. 

Over the next days and weeks, she and her husband in their house in the suburbs of Kyiv with their dogs, enduring shelling and the threat of the possible invasion, her drawings transformed into imprints of her daily experiences. Starting from sleeping in the basement without electricity or internet connection, spanning all the way into visual discussions about the origin of Russian imperialism and the need to decolonize Russian culture. 

Alevtina Kakhidze, Cancel Russian culture. 2022, published on Facebook. Image courtesy of the artist Alevtina Kakhidze.

Alevtina, who is also a performance artist, picked up her peculiar visual language of fast drawing, small on-the-go sketches in a previous series of works where she criticized consumer society. But her world changed in 2014 when war became a huge part of her realilty because her mother, as so many other people of age, refused to leave their homes on the occupied territories in Eastern Ukraine. 

Phone calls between mother and the daughter, sketches of the mother’s life under the occupation, and other aspects of the war’s political reality built up an extensive visual diary; 2D performances where colorful schematic figures were surrounded by words in different languages – Russian, Ukrainian, English. 

Alevtina Kakhidze, Birthday. 2022, published on Facebook, available via Artists for Ukraine. Image courtesy of the artist Alevtina Kakhidze.

These drawings from 2014 on are not sketches for something else, not preparation for the bigger work, as artists’ diaries and sketchbooks often are. They are snapshots of the moment, visual notes, messages mainly to oneself (and then, to others) not to forget, not to let go even if sometimes that’s exactly what one yearns to do..

Maidan, the occupation of Crimea, and the war in Donbas have changed not just the visual language, but the way artists perceive themselves. As many said during, and especially right after Maidan: when the unthinkable and unimaginable was happening, artists turned into regular citizens, activists, human beings doing whatever they could to help the situation. Even more important, however, was that the inner permission ‘to not be an artist’: allowed not to imagine or reflect, let alone represent, but instead collect, record, save, and try to keep reality intact. 

Already then, eight years before the full-scale invasion and war unfolded, artists were collecting the evidence of atrocities. The struggle for a visual language to grasp and speak about the reality was an attempt to (re)claim agency and to own the narrative, to dare and see the war and its aftermath with their own understanding, not through the imagery supplied by mass-media or commercial culture, and avoiding the recycling art of other wars or conflicts. The aim has been to build a unique form of expression, one that transcends mere tropes; one that is true to the reality of the here and now.

Peripheral vision

Writing about the frames of war, Judith Butler inquired about how the framing of the image of war through cameras affects the materiality of war and influences public discourse about it. She extensively analyzed how the frame of an image includes and excludes certain parts of a narrative, forming resistance potential on the margins; in those zones of exclusion something is undisclosed and the numbers of casualties are not self-explanatory (1). However, Butler writes about the politics of framing the materiality of war for the external gaze. But what happens on the inside, when the perception is framed by someone’s own eyes? What will fall on a blind spot, what is oushed to the periphery?

For those living the daily reality of this current war, the materiality and violence are framed by the Ukrainan government’s explicit ban on the use of the immediate images of destruction – this ban was introduced for security reasons, however, there is an increasing number of cases of international media and Telegram channels violating this ban. 

This experience is complemented by the unspoken expectation of international media to limit the expression of strong emotions. It somehow seems that being openly emotional, like expressing pain or rage, deprives the speaker, regardless of her or his recent experience, of the assumptions of rationality, dignity, and thus of agency and a valid voice.

It is on the margins of this frame that artists often step in.

‘My husband, artist and musician @maxrobotov is a lieutenant in the Ukrainian army now. He sent me his photo because I was curious what it looked like. Taking photos of soldiers and military objects is forbidden now in Ukraine because of the war. Before the escalation of the war, I was contemplating the commonalitiesof the military optic and artistic view. Max represents both positions now,’ wrote Lesya Khomenko on her Facebook page in mid-March. Below is her painting of the photo of her husband, bareheaded, in half-military half-civilian clothes, giving military salute. It’s her first work after February 24 and after relocation to Western Ukraine. Somewhere behind the surface of this clearly distanced, even formal painting and behind the artist’s calm words is fear, suffocating fear never to be able to see your loved one again.

Lesya Khomenko’s portrait of her husband, based on a photo, 2022. Image courtesy of the artist Lesya Khomenko.

Kateryna Lysovenko spent a few nights in a bomb shelter in Kyiv with her two children and a cat before relocating first to Lviv, then to Poland, and soon to Austria. Lysovenko created a number of smaller watercolours while on the road. Schematic, flat, almost faceless figures stand against the grim background, almost dissolving in it. One of the works says ‘Propaganda of the living world. Stop murder.’

Kateryna Lysovenko, Propaganda of the living world. Stop murder. 2022. Image courtesy of the artist Kateryna Lysovenko.

The living world, human and non-human relations, care for the world but also the care of a mother for her child had been Kateryna’s topics well before the war. Arriving in Poland, lost and disoriented, her children deeply traumatized, she got a residency support from BWA Zielona Góra.  There she goes back to large-scale painting: human figures get more shape and sometimes even faces, they are mostly female, carrying or holding, sometimes cradling children. She’s almost back to her usual imagery with a few striking exceptions, however: on most works, the colors are gone or faded, and once in a while, maybe on especially emotionally hard days, the strong corporeality of bodies shrinks again to small, shapeless figures, piled up in a mass graves or spread on the ground, raped, bleeding. 

Kateryna Lyvosenko, They Can Repeat. 2022, published on Instagram. Image courtesy of the artist Kateryna Lysovenko.

Accompanying the images of her works on her Instagram, another diary of the war, the artist writes, ‘I carry gardens of sorrow, gardens of anger from irreparable loss, I remember everything that disappears, I want to breathe deeper to accommodate more, I am now a moving cemetery.’

Kateryna Lysovenko, Gardens of Sorrow. 2022, published on Instagram. Image courtesy of the artist Kateryna Lysovenko.

Bodies, shapeless ones looking more like outlines or abstract figurines or more definitively feminine, are one of the main symbols in the imagery of this war. Shapeless ones usually come en masse – in bomb shelters or train stations. Female ones, naked and apparently vulnerable, protect, embrace, or stop the tanks, like in the works of the female artist who works under the alias Kinder Album; iothers grow into and with the nature, turning into birds, animals or vegetation, like in works by Sana Shakhmuradova.

Sana Shakhmuradova: Dedicated to victims (women, children, civilians) raped, tortured, suffered and died because of Russian inhumane attack and violence. 2022, published on Instagram. Image courtesy of the artist Sana Shakamuradova.

The imagery and symbolism of these and many other artists’ diaries are very simple and schematic, lines are fast, colors are rough, emotions are raw. Even if already exhibited somewhere in exile, these works are still mostly meant as notes to oneself, semi-public diaries available on social media, a regular exercise in seeing and feeling without a chance to escape. 

They remind of what is seen should never become unseen and what’s been understood can never be dismissed. The overwhelming reality of this war needs to find its way onto the physical surface of paper, canvas, or wall, to stop it from being forgotten.

Kinder Album, Russian Soldiers Rape Women in Ukrainian Cities. 2022, published on Instagram. Image courtesy of the artist Kinder Album.

As for male artists and the male imagery of the war, the silence is even more literal. Many notable artists as well as writers, actors, film directors, researchers, and other intellectuals, voluntarily enlisted either into the army or into the territory defense units. The works they could have drawn, painted, written, filmed, is now covered in the throbbing silence of the war.

Testimonial

International discussions about the role and function of art in the war are tailored to notions like ‘healing’ and ‘peaceful mutual understanding.’Neither of these are expressed in the current works of Ukrainian. 

It is testimony, it is the evidence of the tragedy that should have never happened, but indeed it has. It’s a powerful emancipatory work to create a visual language that can grasp these events, the loss, the emotions; to record this particular present in a new, uncomfortable yet distinct voice.

After the first major wave of the pandemic, Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe wrote, ‘fundamental vulnerability is the very essence of humanity (2).’ 

Art conceived as a daily practice of seeing and enduring is an evidence to this fundamental vulnerability.

(1) Judith Butler Frames of War. When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2010)

(2) Mbembe, Achille. ‘The Weight of Life. On the Economy of Human Lives.’ Eurozine. https://www.eurozine.com/the-weight-of-life/. Publication date: 06.07.2020.

The Experience of Powerlessness Changes Everything

On the third day of the war, when hundreds of people in Ukraine had already been killed by the Russian army, many people at a rally in Düsseldorf sank to their knees. In grief. In humility. In pain. The rally had originally been planned by Belarusians in North Rhine-Westphalia as a protest against the dictatorship in their native country, and in response to Alexander Lukashenko’s plans to change the Belarusian constitution so that he could no longer be prosecuted for his actions in office: total immunity for a dictator, in other words.

At best, maybe about 50 people might have been expected to turn up for the rally. Just as for all the previous ones. After 18 months of protests, no one was under any illusions anymore. But this time was different. Ukrainians were being killed by Russian missiles launched from Belarusian soil. The Belarusian rally in Düsseldorf turned into a demonstration against the war, in which over 5000 people took part. The Belarusians spoke publicly of their sense of shame and guilt at not having been able to stop Lukashenko and thereby prevent the war. For if it had not been for Lukashenko and his willingness to let Russia useBelarusian territory as a staging post for its troops, would Putin have gone to war against Ukraine at all?

German civil society and politicians alike spoke of solidarity. The first time I heard that word at the rally, my eyes filled with tears: tears of anger. Quite apart from the fact that solidarity confers no protection from Russian tanks and missiles, as a Belarusian I knew that if all the Ukrainians could hope for was “solidarity”, then it was all over for their country.

I recalled an email someone had sent me back when the images from Belarus could still make headlines in Germany: “I bow before the people of Belarus and their peaceful protest”. At the same time, he cancelled his planned participation in a solidarity rally.

“What can you expect from a repressive dictatorship?”

By then I was already hearing crude allegations from activists in the German peace movement that the Belarusian opposition was being controlled and funded from the West, and that the security forces had just been ensuring law and order in the country. The general public did not get to hear about the various, though isolated, initiatives in Germany in support of the peaceful protests in Belarus, and the media had long since considered the story done and dusted. I consoled myself with the thought that the “What can you expect from a repressive dictatorship?” attitude taken by many Germans stemmed from the misery of powerlessness rather than from boredom or indifference. A UN report had only just confirmed torture and sexual violence in Belarusian prisons – a full 18-plus months after the fraudulent election of 9 August 2020.

It is not the truth that is the first to die in wartime, but people. The truth is now clearly visible in the form of all the sanctions it has suddenly become possible to impose on Belarus as a consequence of the Ukraine war. These starkly reveal just how closely the Belarusian dictatorship remained connected and networked with the West during those 18 months – despite all the West’s declarations of its refusal to recognise Lukashenko as President.

As recently as the end of 2021, even independent Belarusian economists were talking about an “export miracle”. The top 5 countries for Belarusian exports in January 2022 were Russia, Ukraine, the Netherlands, Poland and the USA. For imports they were Russia, China, Ukraine, Germany and Poland. So for the whole of 2021, Belarusians had just been deluding themselves that the whole world regarded Lukashenko as toxic. How many petitions and letters from Belarusians did it take, just to get Belarus excluded from the Eurovision Song Contest!

Belarus’s own suffering was not enough to make the Council of Europe or the World Cycling Federation break off relations with the country: for that, the suffering of Ukraine was required too. What happened to all the concerns that sanctions would hurt “ordinary Belarusians”?

When Belarusians were striking, protesting, paying with their freedom for every word they expressed in public, and demanding that Lukashenko be isolated and all relations with him broken off, they were fobbed off with concern and solidarity. If the EU had moved swiftly to genuinely isolate Lukashenko at that point, something might still have been achieved. Instead, it took the political line of non-interference, somehow uniting two mutually contradictory ways of looking at the country: on the one hand, “the situation” in Belarus was an internal matter; on the other, Belarus came under Russia’s informal sphere of influence.

Russia’s interference in Belarusian affairs was thus itself viewed as an internal matter in which it would be inappropriate to interfere. Supporting peaceful protest could have provoked Vladimir Putin and jeopardised peace in Europe. Belarus was viewed as a state that had a government but no sovereignty. With this view the West had long since gifted Belarus to Putin and betrayed the Belarusian protesters and resisters defending their freedom.

So for more than a year and a half now I have been asking myself why Western democracies still regard freedom, human dignity and the rule of law as merely local privileges, while dictators are allowed to operate and thrive globally. If anyone has had the freedom to reshape the world order in recent years, it is the dictators. But not the people who have to live under them.

The walls on the EU’s eastern borders are growing

Ever since a Ryanair plane was forced to land in Minsk, European airspace has been protected from Belarusians: there are no more flights to or from the city. Walls are springing up along the EU’s eastern external borders to keep out the refugees driven there by Lukashenko. If anything is truly borderless in this world, it is not human rights, but the influence of Russian propaganda, the understanding shown towards authoritarian regimes and the inability to distinguish freedom from bondage.

Public discourse in Germany, for example, explicitly emphasises that what is happening in Ukraine is “Putin’s war”, thereby drawing a fine distinction between Putin and Russians as a whole. No such distinction is made between Lukashenko and Belarusians, however, or even if it is, Belarusians’ desire for peace and freedom is met with nothing more than warm words. And this despite the fact that the EU does not regard Lukashenko (unlike Putin) as a legitimate president, and that Chatham House research has repeatedly shown that the majority of Belarusians oppose the war. There are Belarusian volunteers fighting alongside Ukrainians. Others are documenting and publishing data on Russian military movements in Belarus. Others are bringing rail transport to a standstill. Others are unable to do anything because they are in prison. Others risk their freedom with every comment they post on social media. How many Belarusians are there like this? I don’t know. How could I? Enough? Not enough to stop the war, that’s for sure.

The 1108 political prisoners and more than 40,000 people who have experienced Belarusian prisons from the inside (2021 figures; no later data available) have been left to face the regime alone. And no one here can even begin to imagine what that means.

You just want to pop out to the shops, for instance, but instead suddenly find yourself being interrogated and confessing, under duress, to crimes, extremist crimes, you’ve never committed. Your confession is recorded on film. Some of these confessions are published immediately; others are kept back for future use, just in case.

Or you suddenly notice that the peep-hole in your front door has been covered over with something that looks like chewing-gum, so you can’t see the people entering your neighbour’s flat. Then you know that someone is being thrown to the floor there and beaten up before being arrested. You learn to see through walls.

Or you hear that the prisons have temporarily stopped accepting parcels for prisoners, and you know it’s ominous. No one will ever find out what happens behind those prison bars. This experience of powerlessness will change everything for ever. You can still breathe in. But for more than 18 months now, you have not dared to breathe out.

In Germany it is now known, in theory at least, where Belarus is, geographically speaking. But where is it really, when so many Belarusians are trying to get away from it? In Uzbekistan, replies one of my Belarusian friends. Some Belarusians would say Georgia; many others would speak of Poland or Lithuania. Thousands would have said Ukraine – if you’d asked them before the war. Since 24 February [2022], hundreds, maybe thousands (no one knows the exact number) more Belarusians have fled the country, this time for fear of mobilisation.

Belarus has been exiled, but is has also been put behind walls that have turned it into a giant prison. There is now nowhere in the world where Belarusians can feel safe. For they come from a state that is now Russia’s accomplice. And the world has a short memory. Who is there now who is prepared to share Belarusians’ burden of shame and guilt?

Otherwise there is really nothing new: On day four of the war Lukashenko secured his immunity. Amongst other changes, the country lost its constitutionally enshrined principle of neutrality, and almost a thousand people have been arrested for their anti-war-protests in Belarus. Arrests, threats, house searches and torture are still going on.  But who is still looking? And how would that even be possible?

Translation by Paula Kirby / Voxeurop.