Oksana Briukhovetska, was born and lives in Ukraine. Her artistic practice reflects the post-Soviet social landscape as well as autobiography. She works with topics of memory, social and gender trauma, touching on social topics through the study of personal experience. Her work addresses the issues of Ukrainian labor migration, the impacts of ongoing military conflict, and the realities of motherhood. Her research practice often includes interviews and conversations, while utilizing a wide range of mediums: drawing, painting, textile, writing, public installation, and interventions into urban spaces. She has also worked on book and graphic design. For nearly a decade she worked as a curator at the Visual Culture Research Center in Kyiv, where her main intention was to give voice to women artists. She continues to research feminist art in both Eastern and Western Europe and is co-editor of the book collection of interviews, published in Ukrainian and English: The Right to Truth: Conversations on Art and Feminism (VCRC, 2019). Among others, she has also collaborated with the Warsaw Museum of Modern Art, European Alternatives, and Krytyka Politychna (Political Critique).

In recent years she has lived in the US, where she has been researching and writing a new book, which aims to present to a Ukrainian audience a more critical discussion of race and anti-racist struggle. She has interviewed over 20 people from different US cities talking about their experiences of racism, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the protests of 2020.

I started to make war rugs to express my pain, my grief and my commitment and love to Ukraine while staying far away, in the US. I have family in Ukraine, and I was watching the news closely since the beginning of the war. Sometimes I felt so helpless and exhausted, and then I heard someone say that we, Ukrainians, should look on the flowers between watching the news, that the beauty of flowers can heal. At the same time, I found myself making small temporary memorials here in Ann Arbor. I hung a poster on a column in central campus that listed the innocent victims of the war and laid flowers on the ground below. I felt a need to settle my grief by bringing flowers to the graves, but since I was far from Ukraine, I created symbolic graves. So, in my mind, flowers and their beauty momentarily connected with the cemetery and deaths.

I worked with textiles, and I decided to cut flowers from fabrics with different floral patterns and create my small memorials on the fabric. Also, this summer of 2022 I went to Chile to learn about Arpilleras textile, and I wanted my rugs to be like Arpillera, which involves telling a story and carrying a message. The paradox of Arpilleras is that they are very beautiful, but they are often telling about something painful and horrible. The same feature flowers on a grave have—they refer to the death with their beauty.

It is hard to depict war visually, because even creating the most horrible images, you’ll never reach the real level of horror that people are experiencing during the war. War kills the beauty, and therefore, beauty can be used as a tool of resistance. When I visited Ukraine this summer of 2022, I felt its beauty in a very sharp way. The beauty that you can lose begins to shine brighter and in the most diverse details.