Life in the occupation is very odd. You feel like you are somewhere in Cuba: it’s hot at all times, and you can’t wrap your mind around a thing.
When the occupation started, my husband, our son, and I moved in with my parents – they had a big house with a big basement. Through the windows of their house we saw tanks, russian troops, russian armored cars. Parading back and forth. I lived that period filled with fear and despair, I started having panic attacks. It was that indefinite time when we didn’t yet learn that russians won’t bomb the city, since they are living on its streets.
I felt rage and anger at myself. I felt disappointed that I know nothing but how to paint. I had a pulping thought – we don’t need the art. We need to know how to bandage the wounds, how to drive a car, know secret roads – I needed the skills that would help my family stay alive, not rules of shades.
The art community of Kherson in its big percentage has left the city, I was alienated, feeling like a Little Prince on an asteroid. Through carousel of these thoughts and feelings, at some point I came to terms with the fact that I won’t be a savior, I’ll be the one needing salvation. Acceptance of one’s role in a critical situation allows you to tame anxiety and act accordingly to your capabilities.
We returned home and, observing reality, I started to catch the images, nuances of the horror that was happening outside. I had a pile of white tiles and markers in my apartment and I painted the battles around me.
To reflect on the war of which I didn’t feel a part of at first was difficult, I felt like I didn’t have the right to do so. Of course, Kherson was in silent terror, but we weren’t bombed like people of Bucha were. I couldn’t depict the grief I didn’t live through and I didn’t want to paint hundreds of dead bodies. I aimed to capture the nuances of russia’s presence, niche aspects of this tragedy that dissolve in the myriad of all the war crimes they are committing.
My first work in the occupation was about snow cleaning. March in Kherson is cold and I wished for the sun to come out to warm up those, who stayed in the basements. I quickly learned that people in Mariupol are wishing the opposite. Where cold is a lesser problem to not having water derived from snow. I found myself scared I wished for a wrong thing.
The war progresses multidimensionally. You live your own grief and that of others, complete strangers, simultaneously. You learn there is no remedy for all.
My art was political. I painted russian soldier’s hand ripping the earring off a Ukrainian woman’s ear. A cut out human hand with a russian flag in it. A flying rat with a fake symbol of peace. People dancing on the bones. The last one I did after I saw russians dining at out restaurants, driving our cars, occupying our flats. Sometimes their wives would come to visit, I saw them chatting on terraces like they have no acknowledgment of their evil. It’s interesting that shoring the painting now woth my Ukrainian friends in cities far from the front line, for whom the war is much further away, they feel it’s about them.
Russians were stealing people from the streets, from their homes. My art was openly anti-russian, but I had a strong conviction they knew nothing of local artists. They didn’t know who I was, they wouldn’t look for me. I always left my phone at home just in case, but I knew russians would think of artists in the very last turn.
I was able to go online and don’t disclose my conversations. I gave an interview over the summer describing our Kherson, the occupation, my art. Perhaps a mistake, but a sense of a more probable recognition of myself started to grow after that. The article was noticed by many people, it was noticed by russian media, it had my name on it and the footage of my pieces.
I closed my profiles, changed my pseudonym and had to bring my works , covered in rug, to an abandoned apartment of my friends’ parents.
Occupation is living in constant fear. Days are a cycle of getting resources, trying to buy food, omitting the russian rubles, hearing the news of neighbors disappearing, being silent and hiding. Hiding yourself, hiding your thoughts, your work, your family.
Only after the liberation have I managed to get my work back. Kherson is now on its second challenge. As russians were kicked out, they started shelling the city with intensity it had never experienced. I don’t know how long it will last, but at least I don’t have to be silent anymore.