Not epistemic enough to be discussed

The following text is from Decorating Art: Beyond the evident (2025), a publication summarizing and documenting public programs of the same name from the Ukrainian Pavilion at the 59th International Art Exhibition at the Venice Biennale.

Academia talks about decolonization

It always talks about it

But with the exception of a few

It doesn’t talk about your father, brother, sister, friend

Colonization by Escape, People of the Cold Trench

It is not sufficiently cognitive to be debated

Darya Tsymbaliuk, Don’t despair. Letters to scholars whose hometown is next attacked by Russia

I wrote this in March 2024. Two years after the start of Ukraine’s full-scale invasion of Russia, this year is a year and a half after I was invited to speak as part of the Ukrainian pavilion at the Venice Biennale, which will open in mid-April. Currently Andrii Dostliev and I have completed a commissioned project called “Comfort Work.”

Despite the fear of war, 2022 has brought hope. It brought hope. With hope, integrated efforts, partnering with Ukrainian cultural experts and similar allies could shift and ultimately undermine the privilege and centrality of Russian culture.

As my colleague and I wrote in a previous article, the beginning of the war in February 2022 marked a turning point as Ukraine transitioned from a colonial state to a colonial state. I think the conversation in Venice was full of optimistic expectations of change, and many of the participants thought themselves to be an active part of it.

I remember the moment at the beginning of the war when I realized that the reason for the cultural representation of the Ukrainian world was so weak was very weak. However, reality turned out to be much more complicated.

As Didier Fasin and Richard Letchman write in their book The Empire of TraumaThe earthquake, which levelled several Armenian cities in 1988, killed tens of thousands and injured more than 100,000 people, also became a politically significant event. Fassin and Rechtman attribute this to the fact that the Soviet world has been “solidly closed to all external interference up until now.” However, more than 30 years after the fall of the Soviet Union, residents of the territory, once forced to be part of it, have repeatedly discovered that Western attention is highly selective and not necessarily dependent on how open the country’s region is. Natural disasters and wars at home can attract attention for a short period of time in actual affected areas. As global media covers events, they just discovered parts of the world on maps. In 2014, when Russia occupied Crimea and parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, and the invasion began eight years later, the so-called collective westerns first noticed Ukraine. The house is being destroyed while I write.

Andrii Dostliev, “Dead Pixels”, Silkscreen Poster, 2022.

The consequences of your country being part of traumatic geography on the Western mental map are a very specific form of attention and awareness that your society receives. Oscars were awarded to the film 20 days at Maripol Mstyslav Chernov is a clear example. It’s hard to imagine a Western director starting his speech with the words “I hope this film has never been made.”

The wave of interest in Ukrainian culture caused by a full-scale invasion has undoubtedly led to the creation and opportunity of new public platforms that reveal Ukrainian cultural presence. However, this attention is given in rather strict terms. It was not due to sudden recognition that the broad cultural forms present within Ukraine are more valuable than those in Russia or the West. This scrutiny is accompanied by an embedded hierarchy, a form of temporary solidarity with communities that are physically destroyed by stronger forces. Therefore, the cultural value of products that were given public exposure, especially at the start of a full-scale invasion, was a secondary concern. The main thing was that the creators were from Ukraine and could provide cultural humanitarian assistance.

As a result, we witnessed a surge in Ukraine-related events overseas. They were organized by institutions they wanted to help, but often lacked both the expertise in creating high-quality products and the ability to realize their shortages. The exhibition dedicated to Ukraine featured artists whose origins in Ukraine were the only thing they had in common, and who missed a clear curatorial message.

The flooding of these events into cultural spaces blurred the boundaries of emergency residencies or exhibitions organized as gestures for Ukrainian projects based on solidarity and professional quality. Furthermore, the temporary hype led the cultural workers who had built some of their careers overseas, and was recognized as merely a Ukrainian body, regardless of occupational level. They are considered trauma-bearers, and their activities are framed only in identity-based categories.

In contrast to the art that “can do more than talk about war and permanently remind yourself of the urgency of the situation,” “to override the categories of identity in fixed and binary categories” excludes some very important things. First, the movement beyond the ethnic dimension, predicted to be “more than the people,” is surrounded by artificial categories of national identity, primarily through critical accounts, curatorial work, and audience perceptions. It is impossible to make “post-national” art if the person watching it and those who explain it still recognize the work from the perspective of the author’s nationality and view its “Ukrainian” as its main feature.

Another problem providing a public platform representing Western Ukrainian culture is that such platforms often create “ghettos” where only Ukrainians (refugees or diaspora) and a few like-minded allies take part in events dedicated to Ukraine. This form maintains the hierarchy of the current colonies. It means solidarity, but lack of liberation also provides no real possibility of real impact, as it does not involve integration with a wider audience beyond the narrow pool of Ukrainian sympathizers. The target audience of colonial change does not simply come, and therefore the space is officially provided for the representation of “emotional and traumatic Ukrainian voices”, but the voice is not heard.

On the west side of the Oder River, this scattering of charity was also a means of redemption. It is easier to provide Ukrainian artists with space for the facility for the day’s event, for the day’s event during planned exhibitions. The proliferation of Ukraine-related colonial events serves paradoxically as an alternative to actual colonial (reading: structure) changes.

Andrii Dostliev, “It’s DeColonial” series, 2023.

Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, I have broken the pattern of creating a “Ukrainian ghetto”, and have repeatedly found myself in situations where non-Ukrainian attendance at Ukrainian events caused the uncertainty of Western hosts: “Who are these people in the audience? Do you know them? Are they your friends?”

Now, two years from now, what we initially perceived as a shift towards decolonization is a temporary Ukrainian allocation with little chance of structural change. On the contrary, both cultural and academia institutions are preparing to mobilize existing resources to maintain the status quo and even fight potential threats to privileged positions.

Various strategies for accruing colonial discourse and calculating it to maintain existing colonial hierarchies can be cited here as examples. Marking the term “Russian culture” as an issue led many cultural figures who partnered with it to create a professional identity to register from a symbolic space. Suddenly, everyone stopped being Russian, but continued to defend their professional right to speak on behalf of the entire former Russian colony. Those who left Russia after 2022 have already built their careers there, ceasing the use of the word “Russia” in Bios or for some reason discovering a female grandmother or aunt. symbolically leaving a set of people targeted by the call for “decolonization of Russian culture,” all of these individuals have begun to see themselves as part of the community currently in charge of “decolonization,” or rather preserving the existing colonial hierarchy, but now with the decolonial rapper. Western institutions supported this relationship and easily provided space by self-proclaimed former Russians representing the entire region that once was a Russian empire.

Performance photo “Grandma of Zhytomyr”, Schinkel Pavilion, Berlin, 2024.

The sudden search of family ancestors for a more oppressed heritage has nothing to do with colonial era era erasure or actual decolonization by retrieving multiples. In fact, it is the opposite of seeking colonial justice. Everyone is satisfied as long as the identity of a Russian curator, or other public figures, provides privileged access to institutional resources. Another problematic aspect of such a change in identity is understanding the connection to the Ukrainian context in terms of “primitive supernationalism.” Literally, through blood and soil that ignores social, social and political aspects. From this perspective, being part of a particular cultural community is something that arises. It has nothing to do with conscious choices or everyday elements of the performance of that culture. Therefore, we have a unique paradox. It is the concurrent preservation of colonized identities and the colonial gaze on this identity. (It is worth mentioning that Western researchers traditionally consider “bad nationalism” – offensive to monoethnic groups, monocultures, and those not members of it.

So what should we do? If Ukraine wants to live up to the debate about its colonial approach, and I hope it does – first and foremost, it should focus on creating new horizontal connections with representatives of other colonized communities with similar experiences of oppression. In my opinion, it is with them that the Ukrainian cultural community should primarily be involved and united.

This essay was first published Decorating Art: Beyond the evident. See publication details here.