In The Battle over Mazepa, Mykola Ridnyi uses hip hop culture codes to bring together two great works of world literature — Lord Byron’s “Mazeppa”, 1819, and Alexander Pushkin’s “Poltava”, 1828–1829. The two views of hetman Ivan Mazepa, a political and military leader of Zaporizhian Host and Left-bank Ukraine in the late 17th and early 18th centuries — romanticized and historical vs. conservative and imperialistic — clash in the form of a rap battle. For Byron, Mazepa is a real political and historical figure who turns into a mythological, almost fairy-tale character. Byron sees Mazepa as a romantic hero, captivated by love, and seeks to recreate himself in this image. 10 years after Byron, Pushkin wrote his own poem, where Mazepa is a scoundrel and a traitor, as per the official position of the Russian empire.

Byron essentially introduces Mazepa as part of the global cultural canon: he appears in the paintings of Delacroix and Gericault, in the works of Rilke, Brecht, and Liszt. Pushkin’s imperial view, on the other hand, dominates Russian and Soviet cultures. Among other things, this story is reproduced in Tchaikovsky’s opera “Mazepa”.

Emphasizing the opposition of these two texts and two visions of history, Ridnyi invites four rappers from different cultural backgrounds, where the image of Mazepa is practically invisible now, to write and perform their own responses to the poems. The Battle over Mazepa consists of six rounds of rap battle and an additional video — an interview with the performers in which they explain their readings of these works and their attitude to history.

Soviet propaganda occupied almost all public space in Ukraine in the past. Monuments, architectural elements, and the names of cities and streets sought to perpetuate the myth of a joint victory over the Nazis and the liberating role played by the Soviet Union, emphasizing the friendship between the peoples, and creating images of public figures who contributed to creating this ‘shared’ culture. All monuments played an important role in the creation of a unified image of a world which irrevocably crashed after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Picturesque Ukraine is a series where Yuriy Biley focuses on Soviet postcards and photo albums. Its name refers to a series of engravings by Taras Shevchenko depicting folk life, customs, nature, and monuments in the mid-19th century. Biley goes through albums to pick out photos of monuments that relate to Russia’s influence on Ukraine and a fictional shared history. He enlarges them and creates his own works using cyanotype, a photographic printing technique where sunlight turns images an intense blue colour. They look like they were taken after sunset or at dawn.

The blurred, almost invisible images of the monuments emphasize the false narratives of Soviet propaganda on the one hand, and the futile attempts at aggressive decommunization, capable of destroying the objects, but not the history behind them on the other. The way out of this fog is a conscious choice to rethink one’s own history without censoring or editing it.

The series consists of several sections: Liberators / The Sun has Conquered the Eternal Flame / Great Patriotic War; Friendship of the Peoples, Motherland, Father of the Nation, Imposition of the Foreign Culture, and Destroyed / Damaged / Inaccessible.

So They Won’t Say We Don’t Remember is a documentation of the performance that took place in Myrnohrad in Donetsk oblast. Like the surrounding towns, Myrnohrad grew around a coal mine, which opened in the early 1950s. Artists and curators, alongside local activists, students, engineers, miners, teachers and other residents, walk a route on the ground that corresponds to one of the underground corridors of the Novator mine. The procession begins at the former entrance to the mine and ends at a monument marking the spot where 17 miners died in an accident in 1977, with the bodies of three of them left underground. After this tragedy, the mine was closed.

The memorial procession is an embodied overlapping of the city’s surface topography and its underground map, its Soviet past and Ukrainian present. It underlines the importance of local memory, as remembering the victims of mining accidents played a part in resistance to the Soviet authorities that tried to silence them. It also includes local history in the general history of the country, which is only possible when it consists of many such histories. Walking the route that miners once took — under their own houses and streets, under the steppe outside the city — the participants in the performance pay due respect to them, the surrounding landscape, those who remember, and the memory of what will never return.

A family archive and personal memories suddenly turn into a history archive. Somebody who was simply a family member, a grandma, emerges as a hero in the country’s history, a survivor of the Holodomor at the age of 10, and later of the Nazi occupation of the village, when she was a young pregnant woman. At the same time, memory remains intimate. It can warm you or disturb you, when the absence of a loved one leads to the need for their material embodiment, and the creation of an image that can be looked at, and touched.

The textile collage cycle To My Grandma Halia shows images of the artist’s grandmother, Halyna Kysil, a primary school teacher in a village in Volyn. Oksana Briukhovetska selects memories and fragments of her childhood in a village — but, like many memories, they are full of imagination and fantasy. In some of these textile portraits, she is documented in photographs, in others, she is an artistic heroine, here a person, there a spirit. The manual labour invested in these works is an important element in the story, recalling the endless daily work of Grandma Halia, who taught in a school, raising her own children and many schoolchildren, and ran her household.

The artist recalls that when she visited her grandmother in the village, she was immersed in the smell of cows, fresh raw milk, and pies with poppy seeds, cheese, and berries. Also, every summer her grandma would recount the story of how she was young when the war started. “It’s a good thing that Grandma doesn’t know that we lived to see the war too. She would grieve with us. As a survivor, she is a symbol that life goes on”, says the artist.

Artist, researcher, and scholar Darya Tsymbalyuk calls this work a video essay about her own connection and closeness with her mother despite physical distance and the war. It is based on their conversations and photos of Kyiv that her mother Viktoriia shared with Darya on WhatsApp between February 2022 and May 2023. At the visual level, there is no war, at first it even seems like there is a certain idyll on the screen: blue skies, the city’s windows as evening falls, magnolias and peonies in bloom, a flowing river. Visually, the city is recreated with vibrant photographs of flowers from city parks and gardens. Against this backdrop, the artist’s voice creates a strikingly different, almost absurd, reality, with sirens, taped-over windows, death, fear — the reality of war.

The contrast between the visuals and the narrative challenges stereotypical external perceptions of war and how war stories are created. Despite war penetrating everyday life and its most intimate relationships, distorting the usual, the artist’s mother holds on to life and remains open to its various manifestations. During the story, Darya recalls how they once lived between two rivers at home in Mykolaiv, and now they try to encourage each other to go to the pool — to stay afloat not only physically, but also, and above all, metaphorically. The Botanical Documentation of Existence shared by the artist’s mother is about living with all the contradictions brought by the war. The artist’s constant connection with her builds a deeply intimate history of multilayered connections between people, families, cities, plants, and landscapes, with new chapters written every day.

In her artistic practice, Viktoriia Rozentsveih works with the themes of memory, personal experience, and history, exploring the concept of ‘home’ and what shapes it. Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, understanding and feeling of home have radically intensified, because the artist is originally from Nova Kakhovka, which has been occupied since 2022 and suffered major damage after the explosion of the Kakhovka Dam. Kherson oblast, which is still partially occupied, is one of the epicenters of hostilities. The artist’s works are also a kind of self-therapy for accepting and coming to terms with losses.

Built on the juxtapositions and interaction of opposites, playing with light, layering, and transparency, her projects address feelings of uncertainty and confusion, the elusiveness of a sense of ‘one’s own place’ and the erasure of what felt like ‘your own’. Working with fragile materials — transparent fabrics, wrap, paper, plastic — creates tension between simultaneous presence and absence. You are on the edge — staying in touch with your family online, but you still cannot get everyone together.

A Few Meters of My Memories are two layers of plastic wrap with fragments of a Kherson landscape depicted on them. They form a sort of boundary between the real and the imagined. The landscape is the protagonist of this story and simultaneously, a space of absence. It is impossible to see completely: it appears and dissipates, like an ever-receding horizon or an elusive memory. The layering, overlapping, and movement of the material reveal the fragility of memory, torn between the attempt to hold on to the past and the inability to fully restore it.

The work A Few Centimetres of My Memories consists of four transparent plates with engraved fragments of Kherson landscapes. The images are blurry, lacking detail, and there is emptiness between them, just like in a real landscape (almost) destroyed by war. The space on and between the plates is like a field between the past and the present, between home and exile, between what once was and what no longer is.

The book Collective Fantasies and Vostochnyie Resursy [Collective Fantasies and Eastern Resources], or The Little Red Book, as the authors’ friends called it, was put together at the end of 2022, but its creation started much earlier, in 2014. Curator Natasha Chychasova from Donetsk oblast and artist Kateryna Aliinyk from Luhansk oblast were discussing their connections with their lost homes, their attitude towards them, the situation around, and ended up realizing it still hurts. The pain can become less intense, almost invisible, but it continues to meander through the body and break out at the most unexpected moments.

It was very difficult to speak, and their thoughts were constantly getting stuck and drifting, the conversation was coming to a standstill. Because of this inability to speak, Natasha Chychasova and Kateryna Aliinyk began texting each other as writing seemed to provide an opportunity to distance themselves and structure what was very difficult to think about. Sharing texts and thoughts they realized that in one way or another, they constantly talked about the beauty of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, their landscapes and stories, their own deep attachment to this region, which, paradoxically, becomes stronger with every destroyed town and village. It turned out this was a beauty that was difficult to be ready for, but so important to share with everyone who cannot see it.

Portions of these conversations, written on paper rolls, focus on home — an inexhaustible topic with new approaches, images, and words constantly being sought. Losing one’s home is not just about being left without something ‘stable’ and acquired. It means losing one’s whole world.

The book Collective Fantasies and Vostochnyie Resursy  [Collective Fantasies and Eastern Resources] came out in January 2023, but many of the things discussed have not changed. However, the situation at the frontlines increasingly highlights new experiences of loss and changes their own vector of thinking about Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts as places, landscapes, and homes. Among acquaintances and friends from the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, Chychasova and Aliinyk coined the term ‘first- and second-wave IDPs’. This became a kind of marker for the differences in the experiences of those who were forced to leave their homes in 2014 and those who left with the onset of the full-scale invasion. This was an important part of the internal conversation within the displaced community, which continues to try reassembling its own identity and find new ways to work with both its own experiences and the topic of Donetsk and Luhansk regions.

This audio installation expands the dialogue and includes other people’s stories, demonstrating a broader trajectory of forced displacement experiences and understanding of Ukraine’s East.

Participants in this conversation:

Kateryna Aliinyk

Sofiia Hiera

Nastasia Leliuk

Vitalii Matukhno

Milena Khomchenko

Natasha Chychasova