“Support our fight with your art! », Volodymyr Zelensky launched a solemn appeal to the art world gathered for the opening of the Venice Biennale: a five-minute video, broadcast on April 21 in the middle of the opening of the exhibition “This is Ukraine: Defending Freedom”, organized by the Pinchuk Art Center in kyiv. On the facade of the Scuola Grande della Misericordia, a huge Ukrainian flag announces the event, signed by Zelenski.
In front of a full house, the Ukrainian president addressed this international community as he did to the parliaments of many countries: precisely targeting his audience, relying on the power of words. “No words can express the feelings of a little girl from Mariupol who writes a letter to her mother killed by Russian bombs; no words can express what the Ukrainian soldiers felt when they discovered the corpses of hundreds of their fellow citizens in Boutcha. These feelings cannot be shown on television. No platform in the world can evoke what the doctors of Kharkiv felt, themselves bombarded as they came to treat the victims. Only art can convey these feelings. He alone can tell the world things that cannot be shared otherwise. »
The young Ukrainian artists gathered on the ground floor of the Misericordia had not waited for this call to play this role of ambassadors. The painter Lesia Khomenko painted the huge silhouettes of four young soldiers, including her husband, a musician. “A way to say how much I miss him and to remember that everyone can fight in their own way”she explained.
Ruin Fragment
Leader of the artistic resistance, Nikita Kadan traveled from the west of the country, by bus via Romania, with a piece of metal in his luggage: “It’s the fragment of a Kyiv metro station ravaged by a missile, three minutes from my house, he said. Loaded with this piece of metal, I feel connected to my country. To counter Russian propaganda, we need evidence, and archives. Here is a proof, and the proofs also have their poetics. » This fragment of ruin is the heart of the installation he created in a hurry, entitled The Difficulties of Desecration. “Putin assures that we are not a nation. Probably not in the sense of conservative nationalism. But in the sense of a dynamic constellation, rich in very, very diverse people. Our fight is to survive, to keep this right to remain diverse, as Putin tries to eradicate us as an infected member of greater Russia that he would like to amputate. »
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