Ukraine Culture News Roundup

I have long been a fan of the Art Newspaper’s Sophia Kishkovsky. The arts journalist has recently published a very good piece on the Ukrainian cultural institutions and artists who are laboring on restoring art during the war. Kishkovsky writes about institutions such as the Kyiv based Nahirna 22 arts collective, which manages Kyiv artist studios. As well as the conservation and recovery efforts of the Mykhailo Boychuk State Academy of Decorative Applied Arts and Design. She also discusses the PinchukArtCentre’s collaboration with Ukrzaliznytsia, the national rail authority, on a public installation by the New York City-based artist Lesia Khomenko at the Kyiv train station.

I last wrote about Lesia Khomenko’s ongoing retrospective exhibition here.

Last week, Forbes magazine published a rather lovely feature profiling ten Ukrainian women who are actively contributing to the creation and maintenance of Ukrainian culture during wartime. These are brief caption profiles of women “innovating in the fields of art, activism, culture, design, fashion, gastronomy, literature, and photography” (and naturally features fetching photographs of the ladies).

There was a wave of similar group profiles spotlighting Ukrainian artists, writers, and other “culture makers” at the start of the full-scale invasion. In the face of growing “Ukraine exhaustion” among some Western readers, it’s heartening to see magazine editors continue to commission such stories. Restaurateur Anna Andriienko “is redefining Ukrainian culinary culture with her London restaurant Tatar Bunar”. The FT had also included it in a recent article on London Falling in Love With Ukrainian Food. Enjoying a good meal is a universal pleasure and the story of Ukrainian cuisine becoming fashionable in Western capitals is not new. What I find most interesting here is that the Ukrainian trend of interest in traditional Bessarabian cuisine has spread to London.

New volume in The Ukrainian Culture Book series

My deeply cultivated friend Blair A. Ruble – for many years a member of the now shuttered Kennan Institute in Washington DC – has been cataloguing the Ukrainian cultural response to the Russian war. His annual anthology of critical writings is the series The Arts of War: Ukrainian Artists Confront Russia. The third volume in the series has just been released by my own dear publisher, Ibidem Press. Ruble’s dogged labor in compiling cultural reportage and criticism is a continuation of his decade long interest in urban studies – and the manner in which conflicts tend to transform artistic production in cities.

Ruble’s work on Ukrainian cultural production during the war has received criminally little attention. He ranges widely – from avant-garde basement theater productions in Lviv to new innovations in puppetry, and to how Eastern Ukrainian rappers have responded to national identity formation during the war. He a scholar with a rare breadth of interests and I’m enjoying the new volume and look forward to the fourth!

“Looking at Ukraine through the arts reveals a deep resilience which is carrying the culture forward despite the constant Russian assaults” he told me when I visited Washington DC this past week. “This cultural vitality points to a vibrant Ukraine after peace arrives – the point of the series is to try to record a dimension of the war that would otherwise be overlooked.”

Incidentally – the Kennan Institute (which was closed down as a government funded entity by the Trump administration last April) is now relaunching as an independent institution this week!

Much luck to them and to Director Michael C. Kimmage!

Major Boris Mikhailov exhibitions in New York City and London!

The Kharkiv-born photographer Boris Mikhailov now lives in Berlin, but he has emerged as one of the foremost Ukrainian cultural exports to Paris, NYC and London over the last decade. “Ukrainian Diary” which is now up at the Photographers’ Gallery is his first major UK retrospective. I have not seen the exhibition yet – but I do believe that it is the same assortment of Mikhailov’s works that has been touring around Europe since it first opened in Paris in 2022 at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie. In which case it is a huge two story show that spans decades of his career (and I have in fact seen it).

The British reviews are great.

If, dear reader, you happen to be on the other side of the pond and also missed his solo exhibition at the Marian Goodman Gallery earlier this year, you now have the opportunity to see the works currently on display at the Ukrainian Museum in New York City. A real treat for both Londoners and New Yorkers!

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