Making sense of the senseless: Ukrainian war art exhibition arrives in Brussels | Ukraine

Tradial Ukrainian embroidery with weapons and military helicopters; a graffitied portrait of the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin; photographs of smartly dressed schoolchildren standing in the ruins of a gutted building in Kharkiv: all at an exhibition of Ukraine’s latest works of art.

While the country’s art may be getting more attention than ever before, The Captured House exhibition, which opened in Brussels last week, stands out because 90% of the works have been created since the Russian invasion began on February 24.

In the first days of the war, Ukraine’s artists were in shock. “For about three to four weeks, nobody did anything,” said Kate Taylor, curator of the exhibition. “The artists didn’t feel the use of art anymore.”

Then in April, she noticed a boom of new work on her Instagram. And that was the genesis of a traveling exhibition that has been to Berlin, Rome and Amsterdam and opened last week in the EU capital.

With paintings, sculptures and photographs from around 50 Ukrainian artists, Taylor hopes to show the cruel reality of war as it is felt every day. “The exhibition is not about the war itself – it is about a humanitarian disaster that people are going through.”

Counting every child killed in the war is the goal of Daria Koltsova, a Kharkiv-born artist who fled Odesa when the conflict started. Having fled to Palermo via Moldova, she felt lost, endlessly scrolling through the news, overwhelmed by minute-by-minute updates on the bombing of Ukrainian cities and the killing of children. She started making little heads out of clay. “It was the pressure I felt every day, because every day I got those messages. It was really painful, and it all started from my way of living all that, a kind of artistic sublimation.”

When the exhibition opened in Berlin, she spent three hours a day in the basement art room making the heads, each representing a child killed in the war.

Haunting footage taken during this time has become part of the Brussels exhibition. Dressed in a plain antique Ukrainian dress, she carefully sculpts the clay to make eyes, then a nose. Seemingly unwilling to let go, she adds another little head to the pile of screaming faces. “Every time the sculpture is finished, I say goodbye and let it go,” she said. She works from the strain of an updated version of a traditional Ukrainian lullaby, Oy Khodyt Son Kolo Vikon (The dream wanders by the window). And while she sculpts, she thinks about the children who will never grow up.

As of July 28, 358 children were dead and 693 were reported injured, according to official sources cited by the Ukrinform news agency, although the actual number is likely to be much higher.

The artist plans to create a new head for each child killed in the war: “So many people have died that we don’t have enough time to honor the deaths as they should be honored.”

Other works consider the aggressor, such as Ihor Husev’s images of Russian classics distorted with graffiti. A portrait of Pushkin, the national poet taught in all Russian schools, has been overwritten with Zs – the symbol of the Russian attack. The billowing grandiose seascape, The Ninth Wave, by 19th-century artist Ivan Aivazovsky, is scrawled with the slogan “Russian warship go fuck yourself” — Ukrainian defenders’ response to a Russian naval vessel that has become a national rallying cry.

These works are part of the “cancel Russia” movement that has seen Ukrainian cities remove sculptures and rename public spaces. But the issue of Russian high culture is not universally popular in Ukraine, nor is it straightforward. Aivazovsky was born in Feodosia in Crimea, a part of Ukraine that was occupied and then annexed in 2014.

The exhibition also highlights photojournalists whose images brought the horror of war to the world, such as Maksim Levin, a longtime Reuters contributor who was killed near Kiev during the first weeks of the war, and Evgeniy Maloletka, an AP photographer who, along with his videojournalist colleague Mstyslav Chernov remained in besieged Mariupol when all other international media had left, to document the relentless attacks on civilians, such as heavily pregnant women who escaped a bombed maternity hospital.

The final exhibition is not a work of art, but a steel door from a house in Irpin. The occupants of the house, a family with two children, fled on foot to Kiev, 25 km away. They survived. Their house was bombed to rubble, except for the front door. When the door arrived in Berlin for the exhibition in early May, it was thick with dust and smelled of fire. “It was kind of amazing,” recalls Taylor, the curator. “I feel a certain power in the art and in the original works that it will not be possible to show or give in five years.”

The transformation from a shabby house entrance to a war-torn museum exhibition in less than three months underlines the dizzying speed of the artistic response to the war. “I’ve always thought that artists needed time and distance to have reflection, especially on a subject like a war, but we don’t have that time and distance,” Taylor said.

The exhibition, funded by Ukraine’s government, is part of Kiev’s cultural diplomacy aimed at countering arguments that the war was provoked by Nato expansion or Kyiv. The team encountered such narratives above all in Italy, Taylor said, where polls show people are less likely to see Russia as responsible for the war than elsewhere in the European Union.

In Berlin, people left the exhibition in tears, while in Rome “our social work” was more important, Taylor said, referring to exhibition visitors who blamed Nato for the war. “And I have nothing to say about it, because you have to come to Mariupol and have this conversation.”

After the exhibition closes in Brussels on Sunday, the team hopes it will travel to New York, Washington and San Francisco next year to show the reality of war to an American audience. “We’re not here [in Brussels] to ask for money or weapons,” Taylor said. “But we are here for people to make their choices when they elect their politicians, when they vote on any level of decisions.”