Artist statement on "Secondary Archive"
https://secondaryarchive.org/artists/dana-kavelina/
Interview about the film "Letter to the Turtledove"
https://www.e-flux.com/video/339843/letter-to-a-turtledove/
Double interview done by Monika Fabijanska
https://bombmagazine.org/articles/olia-fedorova-and-dana-kavelina/
Text by Monika Fabijanska
https://www.independenthq.com/features/dana-kavelina-giving-agency-to-women-victims-of-war
Reviews on exhibitions mentioning my work:
One is newer: “Letter to a Turtledove,” a beautifully jagged video poem from 2020, by the young Ukrainian artist Dana Kavelina. Mixing stop-motion animation, camera-phone videos from Ukrainian soldiers, and backward-projected 1930s Stalinist footage, this wrenching recent work pictures the Donbas (the industrial, predominantly Russian-speaking region of eastern Ukraine) as a territory of both historical and contemporary amnesia, erased here by propaganda, there by indifference. Like so many artists after the 2014 Maidan Revolution — which was not an American plot, as this show initially suggested — she found beneath the polluted Donbas soil the aquifers of a new Ukrainian art, grown only more urgent since the full-scale invasion. When Kavelina’s titular turtledove turns into a flaming fighter jet, when her whispered poetry gives way to air raid sirens, you remember whose signals need to get through, and whose should be jammed.
("The Crossed ‘Signals’ of MoMA’s Largest Ever Video Show" by Jason Farago)
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/06/arts/design/signals-how-video-transformed-the-world-moma.html
Nearby, Dana Kavelina’s series of gruesomely frank drawings, ‘Communications: Exit to the Blind Spot’ (2019), ruminates on the female body as a site of war. In one drawing, which bears the inscription ‘woman kills the son of the enemy’, a female figure hangs a foetus choked by its own blood-red umbilical cord. Downstairs, Kavelina’s 21-minute ‘cinepoeme’, Letter to a Turtle Dove (2020), layers elegiac verse by the artist against a consuming rush of imagery: archival footage of 20th-century Donbas, amateur footage of the war and surrealist animated montages of human-headed birds, bleeding flowers and pinwheeling bodies. A gyre of violence and hope, Kavelina’s film spirals with the dizzying force of history being made in real time.
(‘Women at War’ Is a Feminist Battle Cry" by Zoe Hopkins)
https://www.frieze.com/article/women-at-war-2022-review
But the versatile Kavelina, a rising star in her late twenties, has also created an elegiac, desperately moving video projection. The nearly twenty-one-minute, wide-screen “Letter to a Turtledove” (2020) montages archival film footage of coal miners in the Donbas with expressive women’s faces and hypnotically stylized, almost meditative, fiery explosions. The work engulfs the viewer in a sort of minor-key visual cadenza that sounds the heart and very soul of a nation that has come to awareness of itself—past, present, unknowable future—under unspeakable conditions. Its beauty becomes a Ukrainian weapon as bestirring, if not as practicable, as a donated howitzer.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/07/25/fault-lines-in-america-and-ukraine
Dana Kavelina’s remarkable Mother Lemberg, Mother Lviv (2023) loosely tells of the 1941 Lviv pogroms via stop-motion animation. With absurdity as its primary sensibility, combining devastating suffering, pitch-black humour and magic, Kavelina creates a tactile but dreamlike world.
https://artreview.com/steirischer-herbst-2023-humans-and-demons-graz-review/
"In the attic, however, Dana Kavelina’s animated film The Lemberg Machine (2023) – about the 1941 Nazi pogrom in Lviv – was among the festival’s standout works. Eerily in tune with its setting – the church bells started ringing just as German soldiers appeared on screen – the film also served as a reminder of the 1938 November pogrom that systematized violence against Graz’s Jewish population and of the church’s passive response to National Socialism."
(Steirischer Herbst Enters Its Villain Era by Kathrin Heinich)