The Russian invasion of Ukraine and the subsequent armed conflict forced many Ukrainians, including young students, to flee and settle temporarily or permanently abroad. Many of these refugees now live and work in the Czech Republic, which was a haven for Ukrainian anti-Bolshevik exiles a century ago in the interwar period, thanks to the welcoming policies of T. G. Masaryk, then president of the First Czechoslovak Republic.
The Ukrainian Diaspora at UMPRUM in Prague project focuses on the students at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design (UMPRUM), who have recently relocated to Prague and work in various artistic fields: fine arts, applied arts, graphic and product design, and architecture. This showcase contains introductory texts and student profiles accompanied by interviews and audiovisual presentation of their artworks. The project aims to capture the authentic testimonies of young art students who have experienced trauma due to occupation, colonization and the injustices caused by the current state of war. They have experienced uprootedness and individual destabilization and have seen important concepts being manipulated by Russia, a fact they approach with varying intensity and defiance. Some of them critically reevaluate Ukrainian history and language and national, familial and personal identity with varying degrees of political activism.
The official armed conflict and the so-called full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russian troops began on February 24, 2022. However, a cautious critical review of the international media reveals that the Russian invasion had started earlier, in stealthier ways. Russia launched an unacknowledged war against Ukraine with the military annexation of the Crimean Peninsula in 2014 and by forming two breakaway quasi-states with the help of pro-Russian separatists: Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republic in the east of the country in the Donbas region.
Russia’s armed colonization of Ukraine and the ongoing war has displaced a significant part of the population. Many of the displaced have come to the Czech Republic to live, work and study, both temporarily and permanently. If we narrow this down to our specific context, it is apparent that the number of Ukrainian students at all stages of education has been increasing. A distinct generation of students from the growing Ukrainian diaspora, displaced by the Russian war of aggression, has developed at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague (UMPRUM) as well.
At the time of writing – in September 2024 – there are 28 Ukrainian students and trainees at UMPRUM, while several Ukrainian graduates now pursue professional careers in Prague. In contrast, only a few people from Ukraine studied at the Academy in 2022. They represent a significant – in both quantity and quality – community of artists, which has a unique place not only at the Academy in Prague, but also in Czech culture in general, particularly in the fields of art, design and architecture. However, their contribution has not been adequately documented and acknowledged.
This team project is ideologically and conceptually introduced by a thematically structured essay. In addition to placing Czech–Ukrainian ties within a political, cultural and art-historical context, the project aims to explore various aspects of the lives of UMPRUM students from the Ukrainian minority in the Czech Republic. It recognizes their multitude of artistic expressions and strives to introduce them to an international audience as well as within the environment of the Academy. The curated database published on the digital platform Research Catalogue has been compiled from profiles of the individual students of various disciplines at UMPRUM. Each profile features basic biographical data, a brief description of their artistic work and examples of their audiovisual multimedia projects in their respective fields. In our interviews with the students, we have examined to what extent the work of the individual members of the diaspora is politically engaged, how it deals with the traumatic wartime circumstances, how it reflects displacement from their original home and integration into a new, temporary or permanent home in Prague, how their lives have changed and how they perceive their studies at UMPRUM in Prague. The purpose of such interviews is to offer a deeper insight into the situation, encourage empathy and elicit a more sensitive approach to the individual human stories. For a long time, Ukraine has been at a critical point, one that must be analyzed, discussed and recorded. And it is artists who often have the extraordinary ability to unravel such troubled moments.
The graphic design of the digital edition of Ukrainian Diaspora at UMPRUM in Prague has been created by a PhD student in typography at UMPRUM; in his dissertation project, Ilia Bazhanov also digitizes alphabets used in historical newspapers and magazines issued by the Ukrainian immigrants during the interwar period. Bazhanov attempts to analyze and understand the patterns and stereotypes with which immigrants have tried to preserve their own identity and individuality. He is interested in the interpretation of a particular culture in a different context, questions of cultural appropriation and subversion that are linked with exile, i.e. with deliberate distancing from the political establishment of the original homeland and its official representation. From this point of view, he examines to what extent Ukrainian Cyrillic forms a hybrid mix with the Latin alphabet. Bazhanov generally focuses on the interwar emigration from the “East” as a cultural phenomenon in the context of Central and Western Europe and collaborates with the library and archive of the Slavic Library in Prague. As you will read in the corresponding section below, Ukrainian exiles in Prague and Czech territory have a historical precedent. In certain aspects, the current influx of Ukrainian refugees echoes the Masaryk-supported diaspora of Eastern European refugees in the 1920s and 1930s.[1]
As regards art history, the prevalent, canonical baseline has been largely determined by Western culture. However, this pro-Western discourse is no longer sufficient. Scholarly interest opens a deeper exploration of the work of other unjustly neglected geographical areas, including the work of artists from the post-Soviet bloc and war-torn Ukraine (for comparison, Secondary Archive;[2] theory – Steven Mansbach,[3] Beáta Hock,[4] Raino Isto,[5] Magdalena Radomska[6] following Piotr Piotrowsky,[7] and others).
Ukrainian Diaspora at UMPRUM in Prague builds on recent research in Central and Eastern European art and explores different approaches, forms and attitudes within the most recent Ukrainian work created in the context of the Academy. In her text on the circumstances, creative activities and artistic education of the exiled Ukrainian community in the interwar period, Lada Hubatová-Vacková draws attention to the historical continuity of the Ukrainian artistic scene in the Czech Republic, or more precisely in Czechoslovakia. The topic of education is further elaborated on in Kateřina Klímová’s essay focused on the independent institutions for Ukrainian children in Czechia as a form of emergency aid, including a community center with childcare run by UMPRUM students and teachers. Veronika Soukupová’s study points to a different type of continuity. She elaborates on the return to the principles of handicraft and visuality of folklore and folk traditions in contemporary Ukrainian art, interpreted as a gesture of political defiance. The collection concludes with Darja Lukjanenko’s text, in which she attempts to thoroughly contextualize the Ukrainian diaspora in the Czech Republic. She explores the development of Ukraine and Ukrainian culture in recent years and the fate of students at UMPRUM and other universities in Prague.
Editor’s note: Ukrainian cities in all texts are transcribed from Ukrainian Cyrillic. Instead of culturally inaccurate names such as Kiev, Lvov, Odessa or Zaporozhia, we are using Kyiv, Lviv, Odesa or Zaporizhzhia, forms that are closer to Ukrainian language and culture.
Lada Hubatová-Vacková, Darja Lukjanenko, Kateřina Klímová, Veronika Soukupová
[6] Caterina Preda – Magdalena Radomska (eds.), Plural and Multiple Geographies of Modern and Contemporary Art in East-Central Europe, Routledge, 2025.
Ukrainian Diaspora, Art and Education in Interwar Czechoslovakia
Lada Hubatová-Vacková
Kateřina Klímová
Veronika Soukupová
Darja Lukjanenko
Contributions
Lada Hubatová-Vacková, Darja Lukjanenko, Kateřina Klímová, Veronika Soukupová
Texts
Monika Drlíková, Lada Hubatová-Vacková, Darja Lukjanenko, Kateřina Klímová, Veronika Soukupová
Copy editing
Tereza Štěpánová (čeština), Kate Berens (English)
English translation
Filip Drlík
Copyright
Tereza Štěpánová
Graphic design
Ilja Bažanov & Viktoriia Naumuk
Collaboration
Iva Henault
The project is funded from the Academic Grant Competition of the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague, partly from the Program for Promotion of Applied Research in National and Cultural Identity (NAKI III) of the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic within the scope of the project “Místa tvořivosti. Uměleckoprůmyslové vzdělávání: konstrukce identit, záchrana minulosti a design budoucnosti” (DH23P03OVV061).