Ukrainians mobilize to 'reclaim our art, reclaim our artists'

Marta Trotsiuk has always loved Ukrainian contemporary art. Her personal collection brightens up her dim but warm living room in central Lviv, illuminated only by twinkling lights. Even when the power is on, energy conservation has become a way of life in Ukraine.

When the Russian invasion happened nearly a year ago, Trotsiuk recognized that Ukrainian art and culture — and her connections as president of the Ukrainian Gallerists Association — could be the weapons by which she contributed to the war effort.

She says the conflict in Ukraine has highlighted the importance of art and how it can help document history while offering insight into Ukraine's dynamic culture. Trotsiuk hopes art can also be used as a pressure point to help end the war.

It took only five days for her to assemble like-minded Ukrainian artists and art curators in a group she called Culture Against Aggression.

• CBC News has been on the ground covering Russia's invasion of Ukraine from the start. What do you want to know about their experience there? Send an email to ask@cbc.ca. Our reporters will be taking your questions as the one-year anniversary approaches.

"We decided to enrol in this cultural diplomacy," Trotsiuk said. "We decided to communicate with our colleagues abroad and first ask them to impose cultural sanctions on the Russian Federation, and then to ask them to invite Ukrainians to talk on the international level through culture and art about the situation and about the truth that we have here."

She said the ask seemed simple enough, but it was initially met with a great deal of resistance.

"When the war started we saw that many of our colleagues abroad — in museums, cultural institutions — they wanted to do something,"  Trotsiuk said. "And they made a lot of mistakes."

She says they wanted to bring Ukrainians together with Russians and Belarusians to show unity and to show that art can be bigger than politics.

"It's impossible to have in one room representatives of those three countries. But our colleagues, they just didn't understand that," she said.

Sanctions aim to 'put pressure' on Russia

Trotsiuk has felt disappointed that some of the most famous and visible Russian personalities in the cultural sphere have failed to speak out against the violence their government is perpetrating. She said international institutions then giving them the spotlight is unacceptable, and that barring individuals from their respective fields may put pressure on them to change their approach.

This week, the latest ask by Ukraine on the cultural sanctions front has been for Russian athletes to be excluded from the 2024 Summer Olympics to be held in Paris, a request being supported by a lengthening list of countries from around the world, excluding Canada.

"For the whole Ukrainian sports community, this is a question of principle," said Ukraine's sports minister Vadym Guttsait.

Trotsiuk said it's not hard to find examples to explain why Ukrainians and Russians standing next to one another on a stage can feel impossible. She points to a vivid painting on her wall, set in dramatic shades of pink. It was made by local artist Zirka Savka before the invasion.

"Her husband, from the second day of the war, he went as a volunteer to the army. He's also an artist and he exchanged his paint brush for a machine gun," Trotsiuk said.

She said Savka travelled to Taiwan late in 2022 with Trotsiuk, to showcase Ukrainian culture and the way of life that Ukrainian soldiers are fighting to save. All the while, she was worried about if her husband would live to see tomorrow. Trotsiuk said the idea that anyone would ask this artist or any Ukrainian to then share a stage with a Russian is unthinkable.

"And her art, it's changed also because of the war," Trotsiuk said.

Scrolling through Savka's Instagram account, the brilliant pinks and purples are no more, swapped out now for reds, blacks and oranges. The images have a much more visceral, graphic or violent feel to them now.

WATCH | Destroyed vehicles being used as artists' canvases in Ukraine 

The shifting of art in all its forms will document the timeline of this conflict, of this dark chapter in Ukrainian history. The Ukrainian government has invested in a number of programs to capitalize on the country's rich resource of artists.

One such program is the Metahistory Museum, which is publishing a work of art every day of the war to document the conflict's progression from an artist's point of view. Those digital images are then sold as NFTs (non-fungible tokens) to raise funds for Ukrainian cultural institutions, many of which have been targeted by Russian bombs.

For Alice Zhuravel, this project was a welcome opportunity to step back into the art world. Zhuravel had been trying to make a name for herself as an artist but last February, she felt so pressed by the urgency to help her country, she instead moved into the humanitarian aid sector, where she documents the experiences of Black Ukrainians and Ukrainians with diverse backgrounds.

"With the humanitarian work, you can see your results in the same day," Zhuravel said. Initially, that's what she needed, but a year in, she is eager to return to art in a public way. She has, all along, done it as a manner of reflection and self-care, and hopes to find more time and space for her art moving forward.

"Art, for me, is a very important field in the long-term, the best for social change and for the building up of positive culture," she said.

The work she submitted to The Metahistory Museum was a digital 3D piece meant to document the tragedy in the destruction of Ukrainian land.

"They destroyed for many years our harvest," Zhuravel said. "This harvest of grain and sunflowers, for example."

The Metahistory Museum has raised more than $1.3 million so far.

This year, Ukrainian governments and citizens are engaging in broad conversations about how to remove Russian cultural influences from all realms of Ukrainian life — the derussification of the country — from street names to the debate about removing Russian poet and playwright Alexander Pushkin's name from the theatre in Kharkiv. Conversely, Ukrainians are trying to reclaim other famous artists they say had been previously identified as Soviet, or Russian.

"It's complicated because all the time Ukraine was suffering, we couldn't get our full independence for a long time," Trotsiuk said. "But our culture was, all that time, with us and identity also. [And it is time] to reclaim our art, reclaim our artists."

CBC News has been on the ground covering Russia's invasion of Ukraine from the start. What do you want to know about their experience there? Send an email to ask@cbc.ca. Our reporters will be taking your questions as the one-year anniversary approaches.