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LVIV, Ukraine – When one of Ukraine’s most famous visual artists left his home in Kyiv in the early days of the Russian invasion, she went to the Municipal Art Center in Lviv. Vlada Ralko settled among the hundreds of displaced people who took refuge in the restaurant last month.
Now it is again an art gallery showing wartime works by artists from all over Ukraine, including Ralko, who spent several weeks here in silence, making more than 100 drawings depicting the invasion.
During the same period, Stepan Burban, a rapper from Lviv, added a song to his upcoming album that called for weapons for Ukrainians. He replaced the planned cover for one of Ralko’s last drawings, showing a bomb landing on a crushed womb. “The first week I felt very angry,” Burban said. “Now it’s just constant hatred.”
The war forced Ukrainians to abandon the Russian language and culture
The Ukrainian daily life away from the front line in the last two months has witnessed a complete rejection of everything Russian, combined with the need to tell the world, especially the Russians, what has happened here. Contemporary Ukrainian artists, who for years fought a difficult battle against the Soviet legacy of toughness governing freedom of expression, are now at the forefront of this storytelling mission.
Street posters in Lviv, which has become a gathering place for displaced artists from across the country, depict Ukrainians as white knights, noble defenders of the siege in medieval armor, or men on horses carrying tridents. The Russians are portrayed as bloodthirsty bears, hissing snakes, dead-eyed zombies and red-skinned swindlers.
Local musicians in Lviv, Ukraine, are organizing music classes for children fleeing the violence of the Russian invasion of their hometowns. (Video: Erin Patrick O’Connor, Zoan Murphy / Washington Post)
While the artistic reaction in the capital’s centers in Ukraine is swift, those coming from the east complain about the lack of such a response to Russian aggression eight years ago, when the federation invaded the Crimean peninsula and began the war in Donbass.
Vitaly Matukhno was a teenager in the Luhansk region of eastern Ukraine during the annexation of Crimea. He spent years of formation watching separatists and Russian elements subjugate Ukrainian rule and suppress any hint of Western culture.
“They destroyed our city from the inside to remember that things were better in the Soviet Union,” said Matuhno, now 23.
Prior to the invasion, Matuhno was an activist, artist and publisher. He organizes rave parties, plans art festivals and publishes a magazine presenting the work of his peers. Months ago, in an abandoned TV station in Lisichansk, he discovered numerous recordings from 2002. He plans to create a compilation of scenes from life in the region before the war in Donbass.
“You have these European liberals who say, ‘We want peace,'” Matuhno said. “They are trying to create a dialogue between Russians and Ukrainians. Every Russian is to blame for what is happening now. We have the right to hate them. They are destroying my country. “
Ukraine scans the faces of dead Russians and contacts mothers
At the National Academy of Arts in Lviv, students turned an on-campus bomb shelter into an art gallery, partly to boost morale and partly to entice apathetic and fatalistic students to actually use the shelter when air raid sirens sounded around the city. Upon entering, visitors are greeted with a red bell and an inscription that reads “Putin’s death bell.”
The tenor of the gallery changes as it moves through narrow corridors that testify to the lost. An exhibit asks visitors to draw something they miss from their homes that many cannot return to on a small piece of paper and slide it into a matchbox painted with the Ukrainian flag.
A student who was in Kharkov when the bombing began recorded what he could hear from his balcony for 24 hours during the invasion. During the recording, the chirping of birds is interrupted by explosions. Over time, moments of calm only cause concern, knowing that the other shoe will soon fall again.
The rector of the Kharkiv State Academy of Design and Arts, Alexander Soboliev, now lives in Lviv and works in an office at the academy. He said at least 30 of the more than 1,030 students were missing and unknown, and one was confirmed dead. Students send posters about the war to an initiative started by the school and work to be seen by Russians on social media.
“Nowadays, we give students a lot more freedom in terms of black humor,” he said. “In peacetime, this was not allowed. Now the opposite is true. “A popular topic includes the words of Ukrainian defenders of Snake Island, who are notorious for cursing a Russian warship. Since then, the critical ship has sunk and Ukraine has taken responsibility.
Ukraine issued a postage stamp this week depicting a soldier making an obscene gesture to the ship. At the municipal art center, where Ralko stayed before leaving for Germany, and Bourban now works on his laptop, creating music, the walls, which once housed pottery and Lithuanian photography, are instead covered with images of violence.
Kyiv is coming back to life with an emotional mix of grief and triumph
Among the first works to greet visitors was a drawing of children carried across a river by demonic boatmen. On the other side of the corridor, a drawing of a woman curled up on the ground with four soldiers, one without pants, standing in a semicircle around her.
Bourban played music that had once openly mocked the Ukrainian civilian leadership. This political environment seems distant now, he said. “The words from my last songs about people are no longer relevant. “Something is changing because people are already united,” Bourban said. “I do not know what awaits us after the war. When we have to live in peace and indulge in some ideas and values, it becomes difficult to be this one organism. ”
Violeta Pedoric of Liv contributed to this report.
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