IT WAS LIGHT-YEARS FROM SOCIALIST REALISM. For two days last month, a battleship docked at this port city on the Black Sea was transformed into a daring and provocative post-Soviet art gallery. Ten of Ukraine’s leading artists took over the Slavutich, the Ukrainian Navy’s flagship, billing the event as an escape from the tensions that have arisen between Ukraine and Russia over what to do with the jointly owned Black Sea Fleet.
A Russian theater group with the idea of turning a warship into an art happening approached Marta Kuzma, an American of Ukrainian descent who left the International Center for Photography in New York last year to direct George Soros’s Center for Contemporary Arts in Kiev. Commanders of both Russian and Ukrainian ships proved curiously open to the project, but only the Ukrainians were prepared to open their ship without restrictions.
For the event, titled “The Alchemic Surrender,” Ms. Kuzma encircled the ship with white surrender flags silkscreened with World War II images of cavalry charging through a snowy field; a bright multicolored sail of a dancing woman was hoisted; light-hearted, fanciful images covered the menacing gray decks, masts and portholes; postcard-size photographs of round women in bathing suits lined the port side; a skeleton reading Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” perched on a buoy in the harbor.
Some of the artists inclined toward the disturbing and the grotesque. Pickled mutant fetuses as a metaphor for war floated in portholes. A pornographic film was shown on the main deck.
“This is an opportunity I’ll never get again,” said Ms. Kuzma. “It’s unbelievable that we could show this work, some of which would be too provocative, too taboo in the West, on a military ship.”
And the navy? “Art unites people and transcends nationality,” said the Slavutich’s captain, Karen Khachaturov. Nikolai Savchenko, head of the Ukrainian naval press center, was also in favor of the exhibition. “But ‘surrender’?, he asked. “Maybe they could have come up with a better name.” JILL BARSHAY
