As Darja Lukjanenko notes in her essay for Ukrainian Diaspora at UMPRUM,[1] the culture of Ukraine and other countries of the former Eastern Bloc has been extensively manipulated, eradicated and appropriated under the former or current rule of the Russian Empire. The folk culture of the oppressed communities, due to its “Slavic” nature, found itself in the crosshairs of the official cultural policy of the Soviet and Russian establishment. Thus, since the end of World War II, there has been an ongoing political contamination of folklore traditions and their customs, techniques and typical expression by means of appropriation and abuse by the empire, which, in turn, led to the consolidation of its power.
Local cultural identities including their broader contexts – including the visual arts too – are definitively marked by the hierarchy of geographical and political arrangements and the actions of colonial powers.[2] Practices of systematic disregard, inappropriate transformation or even destruction of cultural expressions of unjustly sequestered communities have become a subject of investigation and reevaluation in the work of present-day researchers and artists. Subversive interpretations within (artistic) research following feminist and postcolonial thought operate as a “soft power” of sorts – an instrument of defiance against the status quo. As regards contemporary Ukrainian art, such positions take on new urgency in the context of Russia’s ongoing war against Ukraine.
In 2017, the Visual Culture Research Center, an independent institution in Kyiv,[3] held an exhibition titled TEXTUS: Embroidery, Textile, Feminism, which illustrated the potential of textile art, in this particular case often rooted in local traditions, using examples of work by female Ukrainian artists.[4] The exhibition was curated by a Ukrainian artist, Oksana Briukhovetska, who was employed by the Center at the time.[5] During 2022 and 2023, Briukhovetska worked on a series of textile collages titled Songs and Flowers for Ukraine, through which she comments on the Russian invasion.[6] She found initial inspiration in the handicrafts tradition rooted in the history of women in her own family on the one hand, and on the other, in the activist art of the 1960s that used textiles as means of expression. The choice of techniques and imagery close to Ukrainian folklore accentuates the political message of the work, which is further reinforced by the slow and therapeutic nature of the whole process of folding and stitching fabrics, which the artist likens to an attempt to reconnect wounds as a consequence of a tragic situation.[7]
At the same time, works by Briukhovetska and the other artists participating in the exhibition remind us what revolutionary art that draws on traditional culture and its textile manifestations could achieve today. Due to their decorative character, textiles have long been associated with a stereotypical idea of the nature of women’s work. For this reason, modernist society excluded textiles from categories of artificial creation pertaining to “high culture” and fine arts.[1] Similar developments accompanied manifestations of folk art, which had historically provided a productive outlet for canonized artists (who were, in many contexts, associated with the term “national”),[2] but the creators themselves – from among indigenous peoples, communities and groups – remained in anonymous seclusion.
In addition to textile collages, this phenomenon makes the medium of embroidery visible (in which the aforementioned themes are interconnected the most, compared to other textile expressions), as pointed out in the 1980s by the British art historian Rozsika Parker in her study Subversive Stitch. The youngest generation of Ukrainian artists currently studying at UMPRUM in Prague also use embroidery to express a political stance. For example, Anya Ivakhno, a student of Type Design and Typography, or Margarita Ivy, who studies at the Fine Arts III studio. In her project “where are you from?”, Anya Ivakhno builds on the graphic principle of a cross stitch as part of folklore embroidery of the Eastern European region, while Margarita Ivy uses embroidery to relay textual messages related to the emotional experience of everyday war reality. The technique of embroidery is historically very closely connected to folklore and folk traditions, which has – as noted earlier – faced intense Russification both in Ukraine’s present and past. However, in one of her performative projects, Anna Solianyk aims to draw attention to the specifics of Ukrainian folk culture through her grandmother’s relationship to the family textile heritage. Issues of folklore and Ukrainian identity are also present in Viktoriia Tymonova’s research dedicated to the still vivid phenomenon of witchcraft and its imprint on popular culture.[3]
The aforementioned artists combine efforts to revive or correct the awareness of one’s own culture through expression that creatively builds on traditional motifs and techniques. They have acquired the knowledge of their practices – essentially forgotten by the youngest generations – from within their families. At the same time, they learn about the uneasy history of the society they live in. It is not a coincidence that they choose from a register of approaches that have an ambiguous position in a hierarchized artistic structure. A recent design theory interprets similarly conceived work in terms of so-called craftivism, a practice that intentionally disrupts constructed dichotomies between art, craft and activism. Craftivism is closely related to the Do-It-Yourself countercultural movement which stood in opposition to accelerating consumerism and acceptance of normative social settings in the latter half of the twentieth century.[4] The perspective of this tendency, combined with the specifics of the history of the post-Soviet countries and the situation of Ukrainian society, can be used to comprehend the radicalism of messages conveyed by artistic projects,[5] despite (or maybe because of) the fact that the artists choose textile materials and techniques associated with softness, vulnerability, tradition, but also sensitivity, which is key to grasping the Ukrainian situation.[6]
Veronika Soukupová
