This body of work was produced during the 2014 Russian invasion in Donetsk and Lugansk oblasts as well as Crimea. In the retrospective, it was a reductive attempt to process what was going on at the time: re-painting images from its media coverage plus snapshots of benign everyday, one small 20x20x35.cm painting each day through most of that year. After I’ve shown the work at Krilova Stelfox, foregrounding a discussion between Ukrainian writers Svitlana Pyrkalo and Russia expert Natalia Antonova, the paintings got shelved. With the breakout of full-scale invasion in February 2022 I started posting one of the works each day in exchange for donations to Unicef Ukraine. Thanks to everyone’s generosity, we were able to raise over £5000 as well as £1200 to artistsorukraine.org
Genocide of Ukrainian people continues, pressures from senseless violence and destruction reverberating across the whole world. As the resistance and strength of my people continued to become more apparent, as it contributes to resisting tyranny everywhere (Naiem, 2022), as well as helps to wean the world off fossil fuel (Freedman, 2022), I became more adamant about the importance of building up my current work as a way to contributing to that resistance and towards imagining the reality we all are looking forward to.
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