History Repeats Itself

As Russia mounts another brutal invasion, the Canadian art community steps up to help Ukraine

by

Many people remember exactly where they were the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated. For me, that defining moment came this year, on Feb. 24. I woke in a low-budget hotel in London and stared at the grimy streaks along the walls of my room. Just then, my phone’s newsfeed flashed red: Russia had invaded Ukraine.

In the hotel’s basement breakfast room, Ukrainian-speaking staff sat huddled in a corner. Some were crying. I longed to tell them my Polish grandparents came from an area that’s now part of Ukraine, and that my mother, deported to Siberia by the Russians during the Second World War, survived with help from an earlier wave of Ukrainian deportees. Instead, I sat alone holding back tears. 

Since that dreadful day, I have watched Canadian artists, galleries and cultural organizations spring into action with remarkable initiatives to aid Ukraine. One of the first to respond was Edward Burtynsky, an internationally renowned photographer based in Toronto. Just days into the invasion, he printed a special-edition run of two of his photographs and offered them to the first 30 people to submit a donation receipt for at least $10,000 to the Red Cross Ukraine Humanitarian Crisis Appeal. Burtynsky, whose parents emigrated from Ukraine after the Second World War, grew up watching his mom make perogies for fundraisers to support the struggle for Ukrainian sovereignty – a moment that didn’t arrive until 1991 with the dissolution of the Soviet Union. His prints sold out in 14 hours, raising more than $600,000, thanks to matching funds provided by the federal government. 

Other fundraisers soon popped up across Canada. Among the most moving were homegrown initiatives like the Canadian Artists’ Sunflowers for Peace auction, organized in part by Suzanne Sandboe, who lives in Grande Prairie, Alta. She happened to be painting sunflowers when she heard about the Russian invasion. Realizing the sunflower is the national flower of Ukraine, she joined forces with two other Alberta artists, Tim Heimdal and Carmen Haakstad. Their online auction raised more than $3,000 for the Ukraine relief fund set up by the UN’s refugee agency. 

Another fundraiser, this one at Zalucky Contemporary, a Toronto art gallery, seemed almost fated. Embroidered Stories, an exhibition by Glasgow-based Canadian Ukrainian artist Ayla Dmyterko, was scheduled well before the invasion, but her theme was prescient. As Juliana Zalucky, the gallery’s director, says: “Ayla’s exhibition dealt directly with issues of migration and misplacement in regard to Russia’s longstanding, cruel and unjust treatment of Ukrainians.” They decided to donate 20 per cent of proceeds from sales to Help Us Help, a Canadian humanitarian organization working on the ground in Ukraine. The instability and dislocation Dmyterko addresses through the lens of her family history is embedded in the name of her ancestral home: the word Ukraine means borderland and evokes centuries of ruthless occupations by neighbouring powers. 

Now, as the latest incarnation of this brutal history is laid bare in headlines, interest in Ukrainian culture is spreading like proverbial ripples on a still lake. Perhaps nowhere more than where I live, Edmonton, the Canadian metropolitan area with one of the highest concentrations of Ukrainian Canadians. Last month, I visited several Ukrainian-themed visual art projects in the city. As well, Ukrainian Canadian Visual Art, an open-access book was published by the Edmonton branch of the Shevchenko Scientific Society of Canada. The scholarly text – with some contributions in Ukrainian – is, by and large, not just readable but eye opening. 

One notable chapter, by Toronto novelist Janice Kulyk Keefer, offers a brilliant treatise, William Kurelek’s Dark Ghosts and Their Heirs. Anyone, including myself, who dismisses Kurelek’s work as quaintly pastoral may be in for a shock. Zaporozhian Cossacks, a 1952 painting Kurelek dedicated to his tyrannical father, who immigrated from what is now Ukraine, mocks patriarchy and, as Kulyk Keefer puts it, depicts “an orgy of violent masculinity.” The painting’s title refers to the central character in Russian-Ukrainian author Nikolai Gogol’s novella Taras Bulba, in which a Zaporozhian Cossack kills his son for aiding the enemy after falling in love with a Polish woman. “Ukraine as brute, patriarchal power … an all-powerful father who believes only in the efficacy of the sword, scorning the power of brush, pen, even love itself, forms a horrific counter to Ukraine as the victim, not the perpetrator of physical violence,” she writes. She describes Kurelek, who struggled with mental illness before his death in 1977, as “painfully complex” and suggests the keynote of his oeuvre is one of “perpetual dissonance.” 

The same week the book was released, the Alberta Council for the Ukrainian Arts in downtown Edmonton opened two shows. Our Hands featured dreamy landscapes and colourful crafts created by some 20 recent arrivals to the area. In stark contrast was a gut-wrenching installation, Doors, by Ruslan Kurt, now based in Toronto. He set up eight doors that were slashed, burned and perforated by bullets in Russian attacks. Volunteers salvaged them from the rubble and shipped them to Canada. Who kicked, pounded or shot at these doors? Who was sheltering behind them? Did they survive? Such questions are intensely personal for Kurt, who, along with almost 8 million others, fled the country. “The war knocked on the door of every Ukrainian,” says Kurt.

Only a short walk away, the Mitchell Art Gallery at MacEwan University is screening six videos by eight Ukrainian artists whose work responds to both the war in Crimea and the current invasion. Give Me Tomorrow, organized by the Shcherbenko Art Centre in Kyiv, continues to Jan. 14. There is a surprising calm in these videos, but, like the ominous music in a horror film, they portend danger. For instance, On the Blade, a video performance by Mariia Proshkovska, is set in a picturesque Italian church. The artist, dressed in a sensuous black dress, patiently sharpens old coins attached to a club-like mortar. Proshkovska’s symbolism – women’s vulnerability to sexual assault by invading soldiers – comes into focus as this strange object takes form as a potential weapon with razor-sharp teeth.

Meanwhile, in Toronto, Barbara Edwards Contemporary recently exhibited The Polataiko Project, a selection of work by Taras Polataiko, a well-known performance and mixed media artist who came to Canada from Ukraine in 1989. His work has long addressed themes of oppression and politically motivated violence. The project, which will eventually move into an online format, included Polataiko’s War. 11 Portraits, a moving series of photographs of wounded soldiers completed in 2014, soon after he left a faculty position at the University of Lethbridge in southern Alberta and returned to Ukraine. The images, shot in a military hospital in Kyiv by photographer Pavlo Terekhov, working in collaboration with Polataiko, show no wounds or scars. We gaze at the solemn, haunted faces of soldiers, their heads resting gently against pillows, from the vantage point of a nurse, a mother or maybe an angel. 

Images like these make the horror of war frighteningly real. As I turn from my computer screen to find solace watching the peaceful, sunlit street outside my home, the privilege of living in a country that has never experienced a major war on its soil fills me with gratitude. But in Ukraine, as a bitter winter takes hold, Russia is targeting energy infrastructure with missile and drone strikes, leaving millions of civilians without power, huddled around whatever heat and light they can find. After centuries of repression and foreign occupations, I hope against hope, historical precedent and my family’s experience that this invasion, once repelled, will be the last. ■

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