Although Russia invaded Ukraine only a month ago, it has already produced artistic responses that show both steely determination and a particular sense of desperate irony, which characterises Ukrainian society, in the face of a dirty and dishonourable war.
In her 2020 project ‘President of Crimea’, which anticipated recent events, Maria Kulikovska cast iron bells with a police stick as the clapper. The casts were of the female members of her family: the bells merged her with her grandmother, her with her mother and her with herself. This was responding to how she could not visit her family and hometown in Crimea because of fears for her life after her art activism.
One day before the full-scale invasion, she made an unfinished resin cast of herself filled with bullets as a premonition. Now, Kulikovska has become a refugee again and has had to face the horrors of the war with her six-month-old baby, spending several days in a parking lot to avoid shelling, then “from time to time running up to the 21st floor to eat and bathe the child before the shelling would start again”. She has now left the country.
