Ukraine’s painful beauty

Perhaps they had been inspired by the words of enthusiastic watercolourist Winston Churchill, who declared: “The arts are essential to any complete national life. The State owes it to itself to sustain and encourage them.”

Vladimir Putin – not renowned for any great aesthetic sensibility – understood that. On the eve of the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, he sneered that the country did not have its own culture and promised to destroy what it did have.

So too Volodymyr Zelensky who – from a somewhat different perspective – told the audience at the 2022 Venice Biennale: “There are no tyrannies that would not try to limit art, because they can see the power of art.”

The PinchukArtCentre in Kyiv embraces that power. It has defied Russian missile attacks, one of which landed a mere 300 metres from the gallery and knocked out the electricity supply, to stage the Future Generation Art Prize (until January 19).

Artists under 35, selected from 12,000 entries from Bangladesh to Norway, from South Africa to China were whittled down to a shortlist of 20 by an international selection committee. To the winner: US $100,000.

But, I ask Bjorn Geldhof, Artistic Director of the Centre, shouldn’t the Pinchuk have organised a competition for Ukrainian artists only? More than 100 of them have been killed since the invasion, surely it is their voices and their vision, the Pinchuk should be celebrating?

“Let me answer with not a yes or a no,” he replies. “I think that our role is not only to promote Ukrainian art but very much also to contribute to a country that is open to the world. We always have one Ukrainian artist represented so this also supports our art because we place this artist in the context of 20 of the foremost representatives of their generation globally.

“It also gives people who are still in Ukraine access to that world, to other ways of thinking. It cannot be that we’re the only ones who are facing questions, for example, about decolonisation or the environment or violence against women. Just because these issues are made by an overseas artist doesn’t mean that the subject is irrelevant to us.”

So who and what did the selection panel choose from the array of video, installation, painting and sculpture? The winner was Ashifka Rahman, from Bangladesh who crafted a dazzling installation of gold filigree strands holding up a platform of green fabric panels.

The work, Behula and a Thousand Tales, a reference to a mythical Bengali love story, is embroidered with the delicate handwritten prayers and letters of women who have been trapped in areas of the country blighted by floods but also been the target of repression, violence and rape.

The walls are decorated with an undulating line which represents the riversides she visited when researching the project and interspersed with testimony from women who have been suffering in silence, such as this from Fatima Behu: “Dear Behula, With tears streaming down my face I must tell you I am carrying baby conceived from the brutal torture I endured.”

Or this from a mother who fears her 12-year-old daughter has been abducted, assaulted and burned alive. “How can I find my beloved daughter in these ashes? How can I gather the broken pieces of my heart?”

It is a work of painful beauty which speaks urgently to the universality of themes discussed by Geldhof. As does an installation, In Between, by Kurdish Iraqi Tara Abdullah which stretches like a wall across the narrow entrance to the gallery.

It is made of metal sheets taken from war-torn regions, pockmarked with bullet holes and decorated with messages of hope and defiance, which echoes to the poignant sound of wailing by Kurdish women. They sing of grief at the loss of loved ones and devastated homes, but they also sing of hope and healing, sentiments which unite the women of Ukraine with those of Kurdistan.

The judges deemed the wall a “bold, fearless engagement with the war” and awarded the 27-year-old US $20,000 as a runner-up for work which “speaks to women’s role in resistance across different geographies and times.”

In contrast Hira Nabi from Pakistan – another US $20,000 winner – has produced the elegiac film Wild Encounters which warns of the threat to the natural world. Straight roads, sawn-down trees and telecom towers are destroying his dream world of a mist shrouded forest, its flowers and wildlife.

“Is no one paying attention?” he asks and answers his own question: “Meanwhile they talk of progress, the fools.”

Porcelain cups are broken into pieces and transformed into expressive mosaics by Egyptian Yasmine El Meleegy, whose A Cup of Tea with Fathy Mahmoud was inspired after drinking tea from a cup signed by Mahmoud, a well-known sculptor in the 1930s and ‘40s whose relief at Cairo University commemorates the student uprising of 1935–1936 against colonial rule.

The mosaics capture that moment but also symbolise how the past can be reimagined to offer hope, however broken the present.

Ukrainian Veronica Hapchenko took inspiration from a harebrained Soviet scheme in the 1930s to divert the flow of rivers from the north to the dry lands of the south. It failed utterly. Her paintings, both muscular and esoteric, conjure up the tremendous energy of the engineers involved in the project against a swirling background which suggests cosmic forces.

Inevitably many of the works are political but Geldhof was pleasantly surprised that the judging panel’s choice of contributions were more varied and of a ‘more ephemeral nature’ than he expected.

One such is by another runner up Taiwan’s Zhang Hang-Xu whose film of his country’s ritual ceremonies creates fantastical landscapes inhabited by spirits, mythological creatures, animals, and plants. Sandra Mujinga, a Congolese-Norwegian, has dreamed up an installation with ghostly hooded figures looming out of a green neon space,

There is however, nothing ephemeral about the wooden sculptures and textiles made by Sinzo Aanza, which react to the exploitation of his country, the Democratic Republic of Congo, during the years of colonial rule.

Millions have died in years of civil strife but he argues that merely recording the huge numbers of victims is not enough to fully explicate the horror. He recalls Stalin’s reaction to the deaths of Ukrainians from the famine he himself had engineered in the 1930s to eliminate their independence movement: “If one man dies of hunger, it is a tragedy. If millions die, it’s just a statistic.”

Two countries, far apart geographically and ethnically with little in common save the suffering they have endured. As Inga Lāce, the chief curator at the Almaty Museum of Arts, Kazakhstan, and co-curator of the exhibition, says: “During our conversations with the artists, we asked how… hope can emerge, how movements can form, bringing bodies and energy towards hope, resistance, and ultimately, liberation.”

This future generation is trying to find the answer. Few of them would be aware of the Royal Academy’s decision all those years ago to keep the show alive “through recognition that feelings of centredness and belonging, solidity and stability provided by the event had become precious resources” but they uphold the sentiment.

As Ashifka Rahman said when she collected the prize: “This offers a unique platform where voices can be heard openly, allowing us to be both expressive and politically engaged.

“The courage shown by those in Ukraine, who organised this event despite immense challenges, makes this award even more extraordinary. It’s a powerful moment for art and the world.”