About
In February 2022 the world witnessed the invasion of Ukraine and all-out war of aggression by the Russian Federation. Since this time, massive casualties, human rights violations, and an unprecedented refugee crisis have ensued. Women artists of Ukraine have responded. They paint on found materials in refugee housing, illustrate in bomb shelters, photograph their shelled cities wearing press passes and bullet proof jackets. They document, create, and share. They post their daily journals and images on social media. They perform at the Grammy Awards. They know their message is powerful and the amplification of their voices is critical for victory in a very real battle for survival.
Curated by Grace Mahoney (U-M Slavic Languages and Literatures) and Jessica Zychowicz, Ph.D. (Fulbright Ukraine and U-M Alumna), "I have a crisis for you": Women Artists of Ukraine Respond to War showcases work created by women artists in response to Russia’s war in Ukraine. The involved artists are painters, photographers, filmmakers, poets, translators, and textile artists. Many of the works exhibited demonstrate a continuity of engagement by the artists with the topic of war, especially since 2014 when the people of Ukraine gathered in a “Revolution of Dignity” against attempts by the Russian Federation to control the country’s independence resulting in Russia’s annexation of the Crimean Peninsula and backing of pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine’s east.
The featured artists have also been selected because of their prominent interest and exploration of issues relating to gender in their works. The title for this exhibit comes from a poem of the same name by Lyuba Yakimchuk:
“— our love’s gone missing, I explain to a friend/ it vanished in one of the wars/ we waged in our kitchen/ — change the word ‘war’ to ‘crisis,’ he suggests/ because a crisis is something everyone has from time to time.”
Like in Yakimchuk’s poem, many of these artists approach the war with personal perspectives. They intertwine, juxtapose, and disrupt experiences of war with the intimacies of personal relationships, the workings interior lives, and perceptions of social roles. The featured artworks and documents engage a range of subjects from women volunteering as combatants to the processes of grieving and mourning and reflect ongoing discourses in Ukrainian feminist scholarship.
Grace Mahoney (curator)
Grace Mahoney is a PhD candidate in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and the IRWG Graduate Fellow for Exhibits at the University of Michigan.
Grace's work as a curator is informed by her training in studio arts, art history, and museum studies, as well as internship and volunteer experience at the Seattle Art Museum, the Ukrainian American Archives and Museum of Detroit, and the Mikhail Bulgakov Memorial Museum in Kyiv.
Grace is a scholar and translator of Ukrainian and Russian literature. She serves as the series editor of the Lost Horse Press Contemporary Ukrainian Poetry Series. In 2014-2015, she participated in the U.S. Fulbright program in Ukraine as a Student Researcher. Her book of translations of Iryna Starovoyt’s poetry, A Field of Foundlings, was published by Lost Horse Press in 2017. Her translations have also been featured in AGNI, Alchemy, Apofenie, harlequin creature, Ukrainian Literature: A Journal of Translations, and Ploughshares.
Grace has scholarly publications in Krytyka (2016), East-West Journal of Ukrainian Studies (2020) and Companion to Victor Pelevin (Academic Studies Press 2022). Along with Dr. Oleh Kotsyuba and Dr. Jessica Zychowicz, she is a co-editor of the forum on Race and Postcolonialism for Krytyka and served as Digitization Project Lead for the Mikhail Bulgakov Digital Collection at University of Michigan Library Digital Content and Collections.
Jessica Zychowicz (curator)
Dr. Jessica Zychowicz is the author of the recent monograph Superfluous Women: Art, Feminism, and Revolution in Twenty-First Century Ukraine (University of Toronto Press 2020). She is currently based in Warsaw/Kyiv and is serving a diverse community of scholars, students, artists, and researchers as the Director of the Fulbright Program in Ukraine & IIE: Institute of International Education Kyiv Office.
Dr. Zychowicz's book won the American Association of Ukrainian Studies Book Prize (2022); the MLA Honorable Mention for the Scaglione Prize in Slavic Studies (2022); the Honorable Mention for the Omelijan Pritsak Prize for Ukrainian Studies at ASEEES (2021). It has been reviewed widely and will soon be published in Poland by the Muzeum Sztuki Nowoczesnej w Warszawie in partnership with Karakter Press Kraków, and in Ukraine by Krytyka Press.
Dr. Zychowicz was a U.S. Fulbright Scholar to Kyiv-Mohyla Academy (2017-2018); a Research Fellow at the University of Toronto Munk School of Global Affairs (2015-2016); a Visiting Scholar at Uppsala University in Sweden (2019); the 2018-2021 Stasiuk Fellow of the University of Alberta in the Contemporary Ukraine Studies Program (CUSP). She is an Elected Board Member of the U.S. Association for Women in Slavic Studies (AWSS); an Advisory Board member of H-Net H-Ukraine, and Advisory Board member of East-West Fundacja. She has given numerous public talks and authored many articles. She earned her doctorate at the University of Michigan and a degree in English literature from U.C. Berkeley. For more information: https://www.jes-zychowicz.com/.