Art's Relation to War. A Case Study of Ukraine.

Abstract

I was always embarrassed about being Ukrainian. My Saturday language school used to give us these badges that read “It’s cool to be Ukrainian!”. That definitely made it less cool. It was almost as if, until Russia launched its full-blown invasion of Ukraine in 2022, that Ukraine never existed at all. Just as the West swept over the Eastern Bloc after the fall of the Soviet Union, the whole world wrote-off Ukraine’s culture as merely a Russian copycat, except that it flourished in its own right. Ukraine’s diaspora somewhat ensconced in its own bubble, helped revitalise what the Motherland regarded as a ‘cultural cringe’. It is through this cultural exchange forced by the deportation, killings and genocide enacted by Russian invaders, that a new visual language flourished. This new language was one of war.