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LVIV, Ukraine — When one of Ukraine’s most renowned visual artists left her home in Kyiv in the early days of the Russian invasion, she went to the Lviv City Art Center. Vlada Ralko has settled in among the hundreds of displaced people who took shelter at the facility last month.
Now it’s an art gallery again, showcasing the war work of artists from across Ukraine, including Ralko, who spent several weeks here in silence, producing more than 100 drawings depicting the invasion.
At the same time, Stepan Burban, a Lviv rapper, added a title to his forthcoming album that amounts to a call to arms for Ukrainians. He swapped out the planned cover artwork for one of Ralko’s recent drawings, showing a bomb landing on a crushed womb. “I was very angry for the first week,” Burban said. “Now it’s just constant hate.”
The war forces Ukrainians to abandon the Russian language and culture
Everyday life in Ukraine away from the front lines for the past two months has been characterized by a wholesale rejection of all things Russian, coupled with a need to tell the world, especially Russians, what happened here. Ukrainian contemporary artists who for years have waged an uphill battle against a Soviet legacy of rigid freedom of expression now find themselves at the forefront of this storytelling mission.
Street posters in Lviv, which has become a meeting place for displaced artists from across the country, depict Ukrainians as white knights, noble siege defenders in medieval armour, or men on horseback with tridents. Russians are portrayed as bloodthirsty bears, snarling snakes, dead-eyed zombies, and red-skinned thugs.
Local musicians in Lviv, Ukraine, organize music classes for children fleeing the violence of the Russian invasion in their hometowns. (Video: Erin Patrick O’Connor, Zoeann Murphy/The Washington Post)
While the artistic response in Ukraine’s metropolises has been swift, comers from the east lament the lack of a similar response to Russian aggression eight years ago, when the Federation invaded the Crimean Peninsula and started the war in Donbass.
Vitaliy Matukhno was a teenager in the Luhansk region of eastern Ukraine during the annexation of Crimea. He spent his formative years watching as the separatists and Russian elements subdued Ukrainian authority and suppressed any hint of Western culture.
“They destroyed our city from the inside so people would remember that things were better in the Soviet Union,” said Matukhno, who is now 23.
Before the invasion, Matukhno was an activist, artist and publisher. He threw raves, planned arts festivals, and published a zine of his peers’ work. Months ago, he discovered a trove of footage from 2002 in an abandoned TV station in Lysyhansk. He plans to compile a compilation of scenes from life in the region before the war in Donbass.
“These European liberals are saying, ‘We want peace,'” Matukhno said. “They are trying to establish a dialogue between Russians and Ukrainians. Every Russian is guilty of what is happening right now. We have the right to hate them. You are destroying my country.”
Ukraine is scanning the faces of dead Russians and contacting mothers
At the Lviv National Academy of Arts, students turned an on-campus bomb shelter into an art gallery, partly to boost morale and partly to entice apathetic and fatalistic college students to actually use the bunker when the air-raid sirens wailed over the city . Upon entering, visitors are greeted with a red bell and a sign that reads “Ring Putin’s Death.”
The tenor of the gallery changes as one walks through narrow corridors that bear witness to what has been lost. One exhibition asks visitors to draw something they miss from home, which many cannot return to, on a tiny piece of paper and put it in a matchbox painted with the Ukrainian flag.
A student who was in Kharkiv when the bombing began recorded what he could hear from his balcony for 24 hours during the invasion. Throughout the shot, the birds’ chirping is interrupted by explosions. Moments of peace only breed fear over time, knowing that the other shoe will soon fall again.
Oleksandr Soboliev, Rector of the Kharkiv State Academy of Design and Arts, now lives in Lviv and works in an office of the Academy. He said at least 30 of the more than 1,030 students are missing and missing and one has been confirmed dead. The students have submitted posters about the war to a school-launched initiative and are working to get Russians to see them on social media.
“Nowadays we give students a lot more freedom in terms of dark humor,” he said. “In peacetime that was not allowed. Now it’s the other way around.” A popular theme is the words of defenders of Ukraine’s Snake Island, who famously used an expletive to a Russian warship. The critical ship has since sunk, and Ukraine has claimed responsibility.
Ukraine this week issued a stamp with a drawing showing a soldier making an obscene gesture towards the ship. At the city arts center, where Ralko lived before he left for Germany and where Burban now works on his laptop and produces music, the walls that used to display pottery and Lithuanian photography are instead covered with depictions of violence.
Kyiv comes back to life with an emotional mix of sadness and triumph
Among the first works to greet visitors is a drawing of children being taken across a river by demonic boatmen. Across the hallway is a drawing of a woman crouching on the floor with four soldiers, one bare-chested, standing in a semicircle around her.
Burban used to play music that once openly mocked the Ukrainian leadership. That political environment now seems far away, he said. “The words from my last songs about people are no longer relevant. Something is changing because people are united now,” Burban said. “I don’t know what awaits us after the war. When we have to live peacefully and surrender to some ideas and values, it becomes difficult to be that unified organism.”
Violetta Pedorych in Lyiv contributed to this report.