by Mark Isaac
On Monday, February 14, the Ukrainian Studies Organization at IU sponsored a book launch discussion featuring a group of international scholars, curators, critics, and artists, including Atlantika Collective member Jessica Zychowicz.
The ambitious book, whose full title is Contemporary Ukrainian and Baltic Art: Political and Social Perspectives, 1991–2021, surveys Ukrainian and Baltic art during the 30 years after the fall of Communism in the region, taking care to understand how the transformations of the last three decades built upon the past and how they might inform the future. The full taped version of the talk is included here.
The taped version of Book Launch: Contemporary Ukrainian and Baltic Art, a discussion sponsored by IU Ukrainian Studies Organization Talks.
A chapter titled “A New Dawn at the Centennial of Suffragism: Artistic Representation in Transeuropean and Transatlantic Kyiv” was penned by Zychowicz. This exceptionally insightful essay skillfully weaves together the evolution of International Women’s Day, the events of the 2014 Maidan Revolution of Dignity, a landmark 2018 feminist exhibition in Kyiv titled “A Space of One’s Own,” and the trial (and acquittal) of a women’s rights banner unfurled at a 2018 march to tell a story of feminist activism and accomplishment that has implications for artists, scholars, and progressive activists well beyond Ukraine’s borders.
A full review of the book and of Zychowicz’s chapter are beyond the scope of this post, but it is worth a brief mention of two salient themes in Zychowicz’s essay that stood out for this reader.
The piece begins by acknowledging the socialist origins of the fight for the right to vote (which was won several years earlier in Eastern Europe than it was in the United States), as well as the fight for women’s rights in general. In the post-Communist environment, which embraced a new nationalism and sought to discard anything associated with the previous regimes, feminism was identified as an unwanted relic of the past. Thus, the efforts of feminist artists in Ukraine have in part been oriented toward reintroducing feminism to the public as neither “regressive nor anti-national.” For example, as part of a participatory art project, feminist artist Alina Kopytsa posed nude for a photograph in front of a wall painted the institutional color blue that is associated with all government buildings in Ukraine. This “visual insubordination” undermines the authority associated with state institutions (and their control over women’s bodies) while also calling attention to the unspoken political meanings associated with many public spaces.
Zychowicz asserts as basic the idea that one of the most important purposes of art is to cast light on what is marginalized or overlooked, and that this act can make what was unseen central to our lives. To elaborate, she calls attention to the 2018 Kyiv art exhibition titled A Space of One’s Own, which included a century’s worth of feminist artworks, including the provocative works of contemporary practitioners. She then interrogates a key question:
Bringing women’s history into greater visibility is the essential work of any author or artist who dares to express herself on the page or canvas. But what if the space of one’s own for self-discovery were transparent?….How does artistic production—the re-contextualization of boundaries between private/public, everyday materials, and multiple framings and perspectives open up new vocabularies, texts, and pathways for constructing ourselves, how we see each other, and the world around us?
The title of the exhibition, A Space of One’s Own, is an allusion to Virginia Woolf’s famous essay A Room of One’s Own, in which she asserts that “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” According to Zychowicz, this work is seen by many scholars as “a breakthrough in the search for a language by which to express non-normative gender experience.” In fact, Woolf posited that feminists would need to create an “Outsider Society” to transform society from their position on its margins.
Although Woolf never specifically created such a society, her writing and publishing efforts moved forcefully in this direction and opened the door for more contemporary artists to initiate a dialogue around such subjects as maternity, fertility and reproduction that is ongoing today. For example, Ukrainian artist Yevgenia Belorusets created photographs of marginalized gay, bisexual and transgender Ukrainians in their domestic settings, blurring the lines between public and private and challenging prevailing views about heteronormativity.
In her extremely satisfying conclusion, Zychowicz urges us to build on these efforts by reimagining the public/private divide in new ways. She notes that Czech author Milan Kundera has identified “transparency” as one of 65 key words in “The Art of the Novel,” and this concept is closely associated with the nineteenth century philosophical interest in the concept of the glass house. But this utopian vision always involved a core element of paradox, since the glass house can equally be identified as an early vision of surveillance and confinement. For feminist artists, always outsiders, this construct will certainly be helpful as they seek to define a path forward. Freedom, Zychowicz notes, “is both a process of achieving the space of one’s own—but also, the ability to leave it at will.”
(Please note that Zychowicz’s viewpoints and scholarship are entirely her own and do not necessary reflect the views of Fulbright Ukraine and the Institute of International Education, Kyiv Office, which she directs.)
Speakers in the discussion included:
Jessica Zychowicz is the Director of Fulbright Ukraine & IIE: Institute of International Education, Kyiv Office. She recently published her monograph, Superfluous Women: Art, Feminism, and Revolution in Twenty-First Century Ukraine (University of Toronto Press 2020). In 2017-2018 Dr. Zychowicz was a U.S. Fulbright Scholar to Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, where she taught courses in visual sociology, gender, and conducted interviews and archival research toward her second book. She has authored numerous articles on gender, human rights, revolution and protest in postcommunism. Dr. Zychowicz is a Board Member of the Association for Women in Slavic Studies (AWSS), an Advisory Board member of H-Net H-Ukraine, and is a founding co-editor of the Forum for Race and Postcolonialism at Krytyka.com.
Svitlana Biedarieva is an art historian and curator with a focus on Eastern European and Latin American art. She holds her PhD in History of Art from the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London.
Kateryna Botanova is a Ukrainian cultural critic, curator, and writer based in Basel. She is a co-curator of CULTURESCAPES, Swiss multidisciplinary biennial, and is an editor of the critical anthologies that accompany each festival, among them On the Edge: Culturescapes 2019 Poland, Archeology of the Future: Culturescapes 2017 Greece, Culturescapes 2021. She has worked extensively with EU Eastern Partnership Culture Program and EUNIC Global as a consultant and expert. A member of PEN Ukraine, she publishes widely on art and culture.
Lia Dostlieva is an artist, cultural anthropologist and essayist. Has a degree in cultural anthropology. Primary areas of her research are trauma, postmemory and agency of vulnerable groups. Works in a wide range of media including photography, installations, textile sculptures, etc. Exhibited her works in Germany, Italy, Ukraine, Poland, Austria, Czech Republic, etc.
Andrii Dostliev is an artist, curator, and photography researcher from Ukraine, currently based in Poland. Has degrees in IT and graphic design. His primary areas of interest are memory, trauma, identity — both personal and collective, and limits of photography as a medium. His art practice works across photography, video, drawing, performance, and installation. Recent solo exhibitions include: ‘Black on Prussian Blue‘, Shcherbenko Art Centre, Kyiv, Ukraine (2021), ‘Black raven sang the water‘, KMBS, Kyiv, Ukraine (2021), and ‘I still feel sorry when I throw away food — Grandma used to tell me stories about the Holodomor‘, Odesa National Art Museum, Odesa, Ukraine (2021–2022). Has published several photobooks.