While the country’s art is perhaps getting more attention than ever, The Captured House exhibition, which opened in Brussels last week, stands out because 90% of the works have been created since the Russian invasion began on February 24. In the first days of the war, Ukrainian artists were in shock. “For about three to four weeks nobody did anything,” said Kate Taylor, the exhibition’s curator. “Artists no longer felt the use of art.” Then in April she noticed an explosion of new work on her Instagram. And that was the genesis of a traveling exhibition that has been to Berlin, Rome and Amsterdam, and which opened last week in the EU capital. With paintings, sculptures and photographs by around 50 Ukrainian artists, Taylor hopes to show the harsh reality of war as it is felt every day. “The exhibition is not about the war itself – it’s about a humanitarian disaster that people go through.” Counting every child killed in the war is the goal of Daria Koltsova, a Kharkiv-born artist who fled Odessa when the conflict began. Having escaped to Palermo via Moldova, she felt lost, endlessly circling the news, overwhelmed by minute-by-minute updates on the bombing of Ukrainian cities and the killing of children. He started making little heads out of clay. “It was the pressure I felt every day, because every day I got these messages. It was really painful and it all started from my way of experiencing all this, a kind of artistic sublimation.” When the exhibit opened in Berlin, he sat for three hours a day in the basement art space making the heads, each representing a child killed in the war. The rudimentary footage taken during this time became part of the Brussels exhibition. Dressed in a simple antique Ukrainian dress, she carefully sculpts the clay to make eyes and then a nose. Seemingly unwilling to let her go, she adds another small head to the pile of screaming faces. “Every time the sculpture is done, I say goodbye and let it go,” he said. He is working on the strains of an updated version of a traditional Ukrainian lullaby, Oy Khodyt Son Kolo Vikon (The Dream Wanders by the Window). And as he sculpts, he thinks of the children who will never grow up. Embroidery by Masha Shubina. Photo: The Captured House As of July 28, 358 children had died and 693 were reported injured, according to official sources cited by the Ukrinform news agency, although the true toll is likely to be much higher. The artist plans to create a new head for each child killed in the war: “So many people have died that we don’t have enough time to commemorate the deaths the way they should be commemorated.” Other works consider the aggressor, such as Ihor Husev’s images of Russian classics defaced with graffiti. A portrait of Pushkin, the national poet taught in every Russian school, has been inscribed with Zs – the symbol of the Russian attack. The breathtakingly majestic seascape, The Ninth Wave, by 19th-century artist Ivan Aivazovsky, is inscribed with the slogan “Russian warship fuck yourself” – the Ukrainian defenders’ response to a Russian navy vessel that has become a national rallying cry . These projects are part of the “cancel Russia” movement that has seen Ukrainian cities remove sculptures and rename public spaces. But questioning Russian high culture is not universally popular in Ukraine, nor simple. Aivazovsky was born in Feodosia, Crimea, a part of Ukraine that was seized and then annexed in 2014. The report also highlights photojournalists whose images brought the horrors of war to the world, such as Maksim Levin, a longtime Reuters contributor who was killed near Kyiv in the first weeks of the war, and Evgeniy Maloletka, an AP photographer who together with his colleague, journalist Mstyslav Chernov, remained in besieged Mariupol when all other international media had gone, to document the merciless attacks on civilians, such as heavily pregnant women fleeing a bombed maternity hospital. Snapshot of a family sheltering from a missile attack, taken by AP photographer Evgeniy Maloletka. Photo: The Captured House The last exhibit is not a work of art, but a steel door from a house in Irpin. The occupants of the house, a family with two children, fled on foot to Kyiv, 15 miles (25 kilometers) away. They survived. Their house was bombed to rubble, except for the front door. When the door arrived in Berlin for the exhibition in early May, it was thick with dust and the smell of fire. “It was in a way amazing,” recalls Taylor, the curator. “I feel a certain power in the art and in these original pieces that I won’t be able to show or give away in five years.” The transformation from the entrance of the mountain to a war-torn museum exhibit in less than three months highlights the breakneck speed of the artistic response to war. “I always thought that artists needed the time and distance to be reflective, especially on a subject like war, but we don’t have that time and distance,” Taylor said. The exhibition, sponsored by the Ukrainian government, is part of Kiev’s cultural diplomacy, aimed at countering arguments that the war was caused by NATO expansion or Kyiv. Such narratives faced the group above all in Italy, Taylor said, where polls show people are less likely to see Russia as responsible for the war than elsewhere in the EU. In Berlin, people left the exhibition in tears, while in Rome “our social work” was more important, Taylor said, referring to visitors to the exhibition who blamed NATO for the war. “And I have nothing to say to that because you have to come to Mariupol and have this discussion.” After the exhibition closes in Brussels on Sunday, the group hopes to go to New York, Washington and San Francisco next year to show the reality of war to the US public. “We are not here [in Brussels] to ask for money or weapons,” Taylor said. “But we are here for people to make their choices when they choose their politicians, when they vote at any level of decision-making.”
