It’s been two years since russia started its full-scale invasion in Ukraine. During this time, the country has shifted its priorities in fighting the aggressor. But what kind of role does art play during war? KALTBLUT spoke to Kateryna Iakovlenko, one of the three curator’s at Jam Factory’s debut exhibition, “Our Years, Our Words, Our Losses, Our Searches, Our Us” to chat about the process of curation and art in general when your country is at war.
KALTBLUT: Can you tell me about the curatorial process of the exhibition? How long did it take for the idea to come together?
Kateryna: We started thinking about this exhibition at our first curatorial team around January 2023. We realised we had similar thoughts about Ukrainian contemporary art right now and the important figures and topics. Somehow, this became a natural process of communication and discussion among us. We decided not to limit ourselves to the time starting from the 24th of February until now, but to delve deeper to show the connection of historical works.
It’s easier to say when we started the curatorial process than answering when we finished it. We had the idea in the early beginning and then proceeded to fill the exhibition with different works; the last one was added two months before the opening of the art centre. We wanted to reflect different events during the full-scale invasion, but we realised we couldn’t reflect on everything happening at the moment.
We decided to stop at the Kakhovka Dam, which was blown up by russia in June 2023. The following flood in Kherson was our last focal point.
KALTBLUT: How did you successfully bring together these diverse works, not only in terms of their content but also organisationally?
Kateryna: Yes, one example is the works displayed by Lucy Ivanova, which were placed in four different locations. We don’t see our exhibition as a huge event, though, as it’s structured over two floors. The ground floor is more historical, and the five smaller rooms in the basement are arranged almost like smaller exhibitions. Around 60 artists and 230 titles and artworks are displayed in the exhibition.
The Jam Factory helped us manage quite well, though. Due to the desire to showcase how artistic practices have evolved since the full-scale invasion, we had the idea of highlighting these differences in the works created at the beginning of the invasion and later. This has motivated us to bring all these works together.
KALTBLUT: The Jam Factory itself has an incredibly vast history. Did you try to incorporate that into the exhibition as well? What was the most challenging part about dealing with the history of the centre, and what was the most joyful part about it?
Kateryna: We didn’t reflect on the building’s history, as alongside ours, there’s also a historical exhibition which fully describes the story of the district and the factory. Of course, there were still some challenges because of the building, as we couldn’t use the walls. We had to bring walls into the space and build new ones. They showed us all the spaces in the beginning, as well as the storage room, which we ended up using as the so-called Kherson-room.
We decided to use everything they had to offer. It was part of this conceptual idea to discuss the role of museums during the war, especially in the case of the Kherson Museum, which is at high risk. We can’t go there, as the museums are all closed during the war. We know the story behind the Regional Kherson Art Museum, where the Russian army has stolen between 80 and 85 percent of the collection.
Therefore, we tried to show it through the personal story of Viacheslav Mashnytskyi, founder of the Museum of Modern Art in Kherson, who has been missing since 2022. The rooms in the basement allowed us to discuss more personal and intimate factors of his work, how these personal stories were shaped by the war and how relationships have changed, and so on.
KALTBLUT: In the exhibition’s catalogue, you mention the role of language in finding words. Could you elaborate on that?
Kateryna: This has been something that became visible since the full-scale invasion started. Ukraine has been at war since 2014, but many people didn’t recognise it as a war. The intense violence and cruelty made us understand the importance of being precise in your choice of words. At the same time, when you use the word “war”, people don’t understand what it means. It’s therefore not only about the vocabulary connected with war and violence. Genocide, for example, has to be processed in the international court and many countries then have to recognise it.
Words are important for regular people and artists. We used archival photos from a public space in Germany filled with political slogans renaming Berlin to Mariupol, Kyiv to Kherson. We have the same ideas, using the same words, the same slogans, “all cities have to be free” or “democracy”. But what does that actually mean? What does it really mean for people? And what do they really need to do for all of these words? Is it just a part of our vocabulary, or does it also need to be proved somehow by actions?
For us, each word becomes very connected to actions. Kateryna Kalytko, a Ukrainian poet, had this idea that all words are verbs. It’s not only about titles or names, but also about action. It means something like an action is behind all of these words. We see how many words are existing in contemporary art right now. An example of this is Andriy Rachinskiy’s series, how words are infected by the war. But also, we’re talking about the language itself, how it was used by Russian propaganda, that in Ukraine, Russian-speaking people, become used to war from different sides. This is somehow reconstructed, and we begin to think about how we talk about the war, or what is behind our words, and what we really need to say.
KALTBLUT: You find a visual approach to working with language in the catalogue, since some pages include symbols and others have a square with an X. What’s the story behind that approach?
Kateryna: This idea comes from how a computer recognises our language. If you type something in your own language, and you have no correct program to recognise it, those symbols would appear. It was the idea of emptiness, because in our exhibition, we also talk about emptiness and blind spots in Ukrainian history. Usually, this was represented as something which does not exist.
But for us, this is not emptiness; this is also a space filled with violence. For example, some Ukrainian artists were killed, or some works were stolen. We also speak about works, using these empty spots in our exhibition for some specific works, or just works which we don’t know how they looked. We’re trying to convey that all our history from the beginning of the century until now was shaped by different types of war and violence. We speak about the persecuted renaissance, for example, and maybe the critical example would be photography by Dan Sotnyk, whom we used in this bookshelf on the ground floor, and you can find his portraits in the catalogue.
The story behind this emptiness is that in the beginning of the 20th century, we had a huge interest in photography, which was also connected with cinema due to the significant cinema production in Kharkiv, Odesa, and Yalta. However, you cannot find any examples or any material of photography in the museum because the archives of all these authors who existed and practised at that time did not survive. People did not survive, and the artworks did not survive. We cannot say the Ukrainian history of photography started in the 20th century because we never got to see this huge amount of photography. However, if you go to some archives, for example, when I looked at the catalogue of young Ukrainian art in 1929, I saw a list of authors, and I also saw the separate section of photography that was represented in this exhibition.
KALTBLUT: So, that implies it was initially in the art space, but the question remains: What happened to these works in the end?
Kateryna: By using these kinds of symbols, we’re trying to show we have something here, but we have to recognise the story behind it. What’s the story behind the emptiness? What exactly was here, and why have they become this emptiness?
KALTBLUT: This reminds me of Provenance Research and how it’s connected to many collections and works. In essence, the work is absent, yet we are aware of its existence. How do you contemplate the provenance research in this situation?
Kateryna: It may not be as evident in contemporary art, but this is also something of great significance for artworks from state museums, such the National Art Museum of Ukraine. Approximately half of the collection was stolen – not exactly half, but some works were taken by Germans during the Second World War, with many similar cases.
Speaking about the collection of the Kherson State Museum, which I mentioned earlier, is also incredibly important. Art historians working in this museum are endeavouring to find any information about each work stolen by russians. They are aware that the collection is now present in Crimea, but they do not know the exact number or which works are there, thus trying to ascertain this information. International media assists them in this investigation through reports and interviews with russian museums and political figures. Therefore, this has become a subject of investigation, but it’s a complex process requiring development from various angles. One crucial aspect is the investigation and work of law enforcement and other relevant authorities involved in this process.
KALTBLUT: In the beginning of our conversation, you mentioned the role of museums right now. What did you mean by that?
Kateryna: This is connected with the idea of emptiness. What do we have in Ukrainian museums, why do we have exactly these works and not some others? This concerns the collection itself, but also the way in which this collection is built.
For example, can this collection survive the war, not be stolen or damaged by missiles or something like that? Do museums have any chance to buy works during the war? This requires a huge amount of money and is part of their practice, but now they are limited by budgets.
It’s almost impossible to buy any works. For instance, the Museum of Contemporary Art, the MOCA Foundation, was founded by an NGO. They decided to buy contemporary artworks.
They recently also opened their archive of art during the war online. The idea is that we shouldn’t wait for the museum with walls. This is a chance to build a museum without walls for now, to buy artworks and collect works right now, and then decide what to do with the whole collection afterwards.
We have the idea of a museum without walls, and also the idea of shared collections. This collection could be present in different museums all over the country. This question of museification and collecting works becomes something very fresh. It touches on other questions, too. For example, can artists create these material works? Do they have any materials or space for this practice? Are they forced to move from the country or to change their profession? All of this is somehow connected to this idea.
Follow @kasia_ia on Instagram to keep up with her work. Check out the @jamfactory.artcenter website if you want to find out more about the exhibition.
Cover photo by @alyona_lobanova.
