Art from War-Torn Ukraine

I cannot remember ever before seeing an exhibition that made me cry. But, so it was when I went to the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe. The current exhibition is called “Amidst cries from the Rubble: Art of Loss and Resilience”. It is a long but good title for a show that illustrates recent art from Ukraine, much of it created from the tools of war.

The curators for the show were Laura Mueller, Deputy Director of the museum, Sasha Samuels and Nina Medvinskaya. The latter did the translations and together with Sasha Samuels found the artists. Nina said that they kept in mind that the artwork featured Ukrainian folk art motifs.

I should start with the work of art that inspired our local newspaper’s weekly culture magazine to publish it on the cover. The work is by Roan Selivachov, a professional Icon painter, who started painting ammunitions boxes in 2014 with the last Russian invasion. As friends and volunteers bring more boxes back from the front the artist uses the sale of his work to provide funds for urgent military needs. He says, “It is a sort of soldier-artist symbiosis”.

Yaroslava Tkachuk applied ammunition casings to the traditional wedding garb in her painting “Woman”, 2023. The artist’s statement, “When I think of a woman, I imagine the space and energy around her. In the face of war, she acquires a newfound power to protect her children, her family, her home, her country, and all else that matters to her”.

Other poignant works using bullet casings are sculptures by Serhii Polubotko At the beginning of the full-scale invasion Polubotko worked with a blacksmith to construct defensive barriers. In his recent sculpture series “Glory to the Sunflower” he endeavors to transform materials of death into ones that affirm life. He explains “The sunflower a Ukrainian emblem, acquired a newfound meaning during the war. It has become a symbol of an unwavering, persevering, and determined nation”.

In the series “Wrapping Art-Art of Salvation” portrait photographer Marta Syrko has found her own way of supporting the cause. She has photographed a number of sculptures that have been wrapped to protect them from shrapnel and debris. This is of a 1983 sculpture by Volodymyr Semkiv.

The last image I will illustrate is a series of pendants by Volodymyr Balyberdin. He calls them “Memory of the Heart” and I see it as symbolic of hope. He has used bullet casings collected near the eastern town of Lzyum after its liberation, melting them down to combine with agate, carnelian, mother of pearl, lapis lazuli, obsidian, and jade in these jeweled pendants.

The exhibition’s introductory wall label contains a sentence that is so apt, ”Art is not merely an expression, but a lifeline – a means of making sense out of chaos”. The museum wanted to see the exhibition travel all over the world but unfortunately, they found because of the difficulties of even getting the works of art here, that this was going to be impossible. What an incredible loss that is.