‘Women at War’: A new group exhibition features the work of artists from war-torn Ukraine
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Just across the Minnesota border in Grand Forks, N.D., there is an exhibition showing art about war. Instead of paintings of battlefields or monuments of generals on horseback that are so common in art history, these artworks have a more intimate quality: bedsheets with scribbled notes, photos of mothers hiding with their children in bunkers, ink sketches of cemeteries and abandoned homes.
These are part of the touring exhibition “Women at War,” on view at the North Dakota Museum of Art, located at the University of North Dakota. The exhibition features the work of 11 leading women artists working in Ukraine.
“It focuses on the experiences of war that aren't typically covered,” Anna Sigrídur Arnar, the museum’s curator of modern and contemporary art. “It obviously features a woman’s experience, but to my mind, in a true feminist fashion, it focuses on all the voices that we don’t typically hear from — the child's experience of war, the disabled, the elderly.”
The artists made much of the work in the immediate aftermath of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.
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“Many of the works that are on view were actually smuggled out of Ukraine,” Sigrídur Arnar says.
There is also work by an artist who is no longer alive, Alla Horska, who was part of the Ukrainian underground movement fighting the Soviet regime in the 1960s.
“Alla Horska was actually killed, murdered in 1970 and it’s presumed she was killed by the KGB,” Sigrídur Arnar says. Horska’s work, Sigridur Arnar says, helps put the exhibit’s contemporary artists in context.
The exhibition first went on view in 2022 in New York. Sigrídur Arnar reached out to the show’s original New York-based curator Monika Fabijanska to bring “Women at War” to the Midwest, with stops in Chicago and Manitoba before arriving at Grand Forks in January.
“I looked at the venues where the show was going and I said, ‘How is it that this show is not going anywhere in the Midwest, which is home to some of the largest Ukrainian immigrant populations,” says Sigrídur Arnar, who grew up in Minnesota and Iceland.
Sigrídur Arnar says that the show has a sense of anti-monumentality to it. The artworks are intimate and small-scale, often because the artists had to flee their studios and make art with what was at hand. The artworks speak to the full spectrum of the horrors of war, including propaganda, the separation of families, sexual assault by invading soldiers and the destruction of identity.
Sigrídur Arnar points to a work called “May You Choke on My Soil,” which is part of the “Tablets of Rage” series by artist Olia Fedorova.
“It’s produced on bedsheets because she was in Kharkiv when it was under attack,” Sigrídur Arnar says. “So, she was working and living in a cellar, like many of her peers and fellow citizens, and she felt helpless.”
On these bedsheets, Fedorova wrote what she calls magic spells and prayers as well as curses to her Russian attackers.
One piece says:
“May you choke on my soil.
May you poison yourself with my air.
May you drown in my waters.
May you burn in my sunlight.
May you stay restless all day and all night long.
And may you be afraid every second.”
Another is a note to God, saying “Please give me strength to always remember who I am.”
“She literally hopes that she doesn't forget who she is,” Sigrídur Arnar says. “So she doesn’t lose her mind.”
Another series on view is by artist Zhanna Kadyrova, who used stones she found in riverbeds of the Carpathian Mountains after fleeing her home of Kyiv. It’s called “Palianytsia,” a Ukrainian word for bread that has become a shibboleth since the war began. “The word ‘palianytsia’ became a symbol, since Russian occupiers are unable to pronounce it correctly,” Kadyrova wrote in an artist statement.
The rivers polished these large stones into an oval shape, much like a loaf of bread. Kadyrova took these stones and cut them to look like sliced bread.
Sigrídur Arnar says the “Palianytsia” series has taken on several meanings, including Christian symbolism of “breaking bread” and the war’s disruption of Ukraine’s role as the “breadbasket of Europe” for its production of wheat.
“On the one hand, you see this static object on a table, but there’s so much more,” Sigrídur Arnar says.
The touring group exhibition, Sigrídur Arnar says, is the first of its kind to be hosted in the U.S. The exhibition is on view through March 30 and Grand Forks is the last stop of its tour.
Curator Monika Fabijanska will give talks at the museum and university on Feb. 27 and 28. On Feb. 28, there will also be a screening of new films by artists Alevtina Kakhidze and Dana Kavelina at the Empire Arts Center.
