KYIV and LVIV, Ukraine — On my first night in Kyiv, there was a far-off explosion. Russia had launched 53 Iranian-made Shahed drones and five cruise missiles at Ukraine. Most were shot down, but one struck an industrial facility in Kyiv Oblast, on the outskirts of the city.
For the next three weeks, as I visited exhibitions and met with artists, curators, and filmmakers in Kyiv and Lviv, I would hear the eerie sound of air raid sirens many times. Ukrainians have been hearing these sirens for two and a half years — and those in the East, for much longer — as they endured constant attacks. Amid Russia’s full-scale invasion, however, I experienced a flourishing, vital, and purposeful art scene.
Many artists in Kyiv are addressing the war full-on. I met with photographer Yana Kononova in The Naked Room, an important gallery for up-and-coming artists that doubles as a cafe. Her large-scale black and white photographs, including of an exhumation site in a forest and the devastated environment around the Kakhovka dam that Russia detonated last year, are both enthralling and harrowing. The works of Oleksiy Sai, whom I met at his studio, are similarly moving. When Russia seized Crimea and invaded parts of Luhansk and Donetsk in 2014, he embarked on his ongoing Bombed series, destroying previous paintings by abrading their surfaces and drilling holes in them to create partially abstract works that resemble aerial views of war-scarred territories.
I also met award-winning filmmaker and anthropologist Nadia Parfan in a cafe — in coffee-obsessed Kyiv, there are many. Her remarkable short documentary I Did Not Want to Make a War Film (2022) concerns her courageous decision to return to her beloved Kyiv in the early days of the invasion. She noted how difficult filmmaking has become, with her team scattered, some abroad, some in the army, and with money tough to come by. Then she surprised me: She is thinking, she told me, of enlisting.
Other artists are addressing the war obliquely. Yasia Khomenko ushers used clothing — “soiled” was the word she emphasized to me — suggesting that which accumulated alongside roads as refugees fled, into gloriously eccentric, multicolored, high-fashion garb/artworks. At the ultra-Soviet Institute of Automatics, which has since been converted into studios, I saw a solemn, atmospheric painting by the young artist Karina Synytsia that includes a ghostly, exquisitely rendered small elephant that I hardly noticed at first, referencing the zookeepers and animals Russians killed in the Kharkiv zoo. In that same building, Anton Saienko’s ball made of soil from his hometown of Sumy evokes a deep connection with the land — but also the war on and for that land. Indeed, a deep cut splits the work.
Some of these visits with artists were unlike any I have ever had before. Bohdan Bunchak wanted to talk about war, not art. After much thought, he had decided to enlist and fought on the front line, becoming the commander of his unit, until he was seriously wounded. He, too, hinted that he may well return to the fight.
I met artists who weren’t making art in any traditional sense — artists who I won’t name, in a location that I won’t disclose. In their shared studio, these tech-savvy creators are instead making innovative, highly effective drones for the army. I have never been pro-military, but felt admiration for those trying to stop Russia’s attempt to brutally subjugate and even erase the country altogether, yet again.
At the Voloshyn Gallery, an important space with a Miami outpost, artist Nikita Kadan gave me a walkthrough of Looking into the Gaps, the excellent exhibition of Ukrainian artists that he curated. As we left, he casually pointed out the spot in the courtyard where Molotov cocktails were stored in the early days of the war, and the nearby playground that was struck by a Russian missile.
That same missile also damaged the renowned Khanenko Museum, an ornate 19th-century mansion that houses an international collection of art. It remains open but is largely empty; the collection is in storage off-site, Director General Yuliya Vaganova told me, as the risk of further attacks is too great. Accentuated by the lighting, the vision of an empty museum floored me.
Every two weeks, and for only one day, a single artwork from the collection — sometimes a masterpiece, sometimes an unheralded work — is exhibited in a space that visitors enter through “a secret door,” Vaganova explained, with one of the curators there to discuss it with visitors. People flock to these special exhibitions. “There is hunger,” she said quietly, “for life-affirming art.”
Indeed, a visit to Zhanna Kadyrova’s lively, cluttered studio was followed by free-spirited revelry outside: wine, electronic music, dancing, communion. The studio houses several of the gray, bread loaf-shaped objects from her Palianytsia (2022–ongoing) series. Palianytsia is a type of bread. It is also a Ukrainian word that Russians can’t properly pronounce, and it became a way to identify saboteurs and spies.
Kadyrova makes these objects from river stones in the Carpathian Mountains, where she and her family sought refuge when Russia attacked Kyiv, and donates all proceeds to artist friends serving in the military. She fashions these works in, and from, Ukraine — its nature and language — and they encapsulate Ukrainian resolve. Biting into one could break one’s teeth.
Between Farewell and Return at Mystetskyi Arsenal, a renowned contemporary art museum, focused on displacement and longing for home. Painter Kateryna Aliinyk (originally from now-occupied Luhansk) and mixed-media artist Alevtina Kakhidze (originally from now-occupied Donetsk) were standouts; the landscape in Aliinyk’s wonderful painting is suffused with sadness, loss, and damage, while Kakhidze’s multipart installation concerns her elderly mother’s attempt to escape Russian occupation. The sirens came just as I was about to leave, three in a row. From the cavernous bomb shelter in the basement, filled with blankets and chairs, I thought about how surreal it felt to be contemplating an exhibition born, in large part, of Russian attacks, as it was very possibly attacking anew.
At the PinchukArtCentre, I toured the international group exhibition I Feel You with Ksenia Malykh, one of the three curators. We stopped, in silence, at Jenny Holzer’s 1984 cast aluminum plaque with the text “GO WHERE PEOPLE SLEEP AND SEE IF THEY ARE SAFE.” No words were needed. Russia routinely targets houses, apartment buildings, and hospitals: where people sleep.
After two weeks in Kyiv, I took the train to Lviv, with its magnificent cathedrals and cobblestone streets, which suffered an aerial attack the day before.
There, I met Lyana Mytsko, the visionary head of the Lviv Municipal Art Center, an exhibition space, music venue, café, artist residency, and community center. The exhibition Welcome to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Kherson, 2002–2022 featured works by beloved Kherson artist, curator, and founder of the museum Vyacheslav Mashnytsky, alongside photos, paintings, books, sculptures, and videos by many other Ukrainian artists.
When Russians temporarily occupied Kherson in 2022, they abducted Mashnytsky. He has not been heard from since — one victim in a very long history of Russia imprisoning and murdering Ukrainian artists, writers, poets, and intellectuals.
Mytsko directed me to the Lviv National Academy of Arts. The basement bomb shelter has been converted into classrooms and working/living areas, so that students can keep studying and making art while Russia attacks.
We then visited the famous Lychakiv Cemetery, and its new section made colorful with flags, photographs, and personal mementos. This is where the heroes — that’s what they are always called — are buried, Lviv residents who died fighting the Russians.
There is ample space for fresh graves.
