On the Black Sea coast in Odessa, behind a door manned by a taciturn porter, there is a dilapidated ship repair shop. One of the many industrial zones in Ukraine that fell into disuse after the collapse of the Soviet Union; But in 2016, a community of young artists began clearing debris, renovating old workshops and building studios.
Now, in 2024, with the city regularly hit by Russian missiles and its streets devoid of the tourists who once flocked to the city’s historic centre, there are only a handful of artists willing to confront the constant threat to life.
Vasya Dmytryk is one of the artists who chooses to stay in his studio a few meters from the coastline, a cozy cave filled with books, tools and metal sculptures hanging from the ceiling. On his counter was a copper and steel sculpture reminiscent of the shape of a drone. His plan is to replace it with a real drone: “We have a very direct mission as artists,” he said. “We are collecting money for the army”
“I’m really rooted in Odessa,” he added. “The things I love and care about are here. “I felt like I couldn’t live without him.”
At the beginning of Russia’s full-scale occupation, he had actively considered whether to “stay and try to preserve Ukrainian culture, or to leave and try to introduce Odessa culture to other cities in Turkey” if the city was occupied by the Russians. Ukraine”.
Her friend, artist and curator Valeriia Nasedkina said: “What happens if everyone leaves? “We insist that we still exist with our presence here.”
Nasedkina and her colleague Volodymyr Chyhrynets are curators of the Odesa National Museum of Fine Arts, an elegant, early 19th-century neoclassical building in the center of the city. In November, a cruise missile hit directly on the outside of the building, blowing out windows, causing plaster to rain down from ceilings onto artworks, creating potholes in the street, and rendering the building’s administrative wing unusable.
Most of the historical artworks in the museum had already been safely evacuated. Dmytryk was part of the volunteer effort that began on February 24, 2022: He biked to the museum at dawn to play his part in the month-long effort to dismantle, pack and preserve the massive, densely hung collection. Nasedkina said that at the time of the attack in November 2023, the museum contained a temporary exhibition and several very large 19th-century canvases remained on the walls, some of which were physically blown out of their frames by shock waves.
Despite the attack, the museum is still in operation. Many of its elegant galleries are echoing and empty. “The last time the second world war happened was like this,” Nasedkina said. However, some rooms hold temporary exhibitions of contemporary artists.
One consists of delicate botanical watercolors of wildflowers (viper, mountain flax, mullein) painted on the Bakhmut front by Borys Eisenberg, a former child raiser who volunteered on the first day of Russia’s full-scale invasion and was killed in July 2023.
Another belongs to Dmytryk; A kinetic sculpture from a boat repair shop, consisting of nails that swing and collide in complex patterns when invisible magnets underneath are activated. As they move, their passes create a “drawing” on the paper on which they lie; Dmytryk said it was a metaphor for the community of artists in Odessa.
A new exhibition is devoted to the latest works of Dasha Chechushkova. A series of etchings based on Goya’s criticism of the follies of Spanish society Los Caprichos hangs along one wall. These were “a collection of symptoms of helplessness: depressions and thoughts that we often cannot express to others.” The work is about loneliness and alienation.” At this point in the war, he said, the gap in experience between Ukrainians — between those who volunteered to fight, those who didn’t volunteer to fight, those who were bereaved, and those who left — “created this distance between people.”
One depicts an exhausted figure, with text that translates as: “Because you can’t stand blaming yourself anymore.” Another says: “The feeling of silence turns the hero into a fool who does not know what else to do.”
Chechushkova, 24, who currently lives in Kiev, was educated in Odessa. Until the beginning of the large-scale occupation, Dmytryk had a studio nearby. A huge white robe hangs from the ceiling as if it were a shroud for a giant, and at the end of the room, a chair and table assembled from his studio in Odessa are apparently trapped in a pile of walls. covered in grayish-white plaster like a monument.
His work has deep roots in Odessa, he said. The city had a distinctive artistic heritage, including the Odessa conceptualists of the 1980s and 90s. Odessa misfits Nasedkina said that those who worked outside the Soviet system in the 60s and 70s and therefore could not access materials or exhibit their works in galleries made art using materials “scavenged” from the streets or flea markets.
“A year ago I experienced a kind of apathy, depression,” said Chyhrynets, co-curator of the show. “I felt like we didn’t need art. One of the themes in Dasha’s work is guilt. There is a feeling of guilt about art in general. Being an artist is a privilege.” But after working on Chechushkova’s exhibition, she said, “Until I took action and as long as I lived, I realized that I had to do what I was good at to the best of my ability.” “Our future plans look like this: to do what we can in the time we have.”