Icons on the Barricades: Ukrainian Protest Art

By Konstantin Akinsha and Alisa Lozhkina

Artists have been at the center of the protests in Ukraine, offering murals, performances, and a golden “throne”

In January, the clashes between Ukrainian anti-government protesters and police and special forces erupted into violence. The center of Kyiv became a battlefield, with smoke from burning tires drifting overhead. Police bullets and gas grenades were met by Molotov cocktails and paving stones. During the last days of the month, while the street battle raged, masked and helmeted protesters and police in full riot gear saw a surreal sight.

Seemingly oblivious of the chaos surrounding him, a young man set up an easel between the opposing forces and worked furiously for a few hours on an oil sketch of the city in revolt. The artist, Maksim Vegera, said later that he couldn’t resist the call of history. In the tradition of Delacroix or Daumier, he found inspiration on the barricades. He wasn’t the only one. From the earliest days of the Ukrainian protests, artists have been at the center of events.

In a sense, they even predicted the turmoil. The Ukrainian equivalent of Dalí’s Premonition of Civil War was an ill-fated mural painted by Volodymyr Kuznetsov on the wall of the Mystetskyi Arsenal (Art Arsenal) last summer. The museum commissioned the work, called Koliyivshchyna: The Last Judgment, for an exhibition dedicated to the 1025th anniversary of the baptism of Kyivan Rus, the precursor of the Russian state.

(image) Volodymyr Kuznetsov’s unfinished mural, Koliyivshchyna: The Last Judgment, was dubbed immoral and covered with black paint.COURTESY VOLODYMYR KUZNETSOV

It wasn’t what museum director Natalia Zabolotna was expecting. The mural depicted the revolutionary masses, guided by the figure of Christ from Michelangelo’s Last Judgment and a member of Pussy Riot wearing a balaclava. In front of the people’s avengers was the cauldron of hell, into which police generals, church leaders, and a long black car carrying, among others, President Viktor Yanukovych, were plunging headlong. The title Koliyivshchyna refers to a violent 18th-century peasant uprising.

Zabolotna denounced the unfinished mural as “immoral” and ordered it painted over. She was clearly unprepared for the ensuing scandal. It rocked the Ukrainian art world.

Vasilii Tsagolov, a well-known Kyiv painter, was another who documented the growing strains in Ukrainian society. He has been working since 2012 on a series of monumental paintings called “The Ghost of Revolution.” Four of them, depicting battles between police and protesters, were exhibited just a month before the unrest began.

Mykola Ridnyi’s response to the increasing repression was simple and eloquent. In a group exhibition at the PinchukArtCentre in Kyiv in November, he showed a row of roughly sculpted police boots.

When the demonstrations began in Maidan (Independence Square), artists began to produce works that were destined not for galleries but for the street. A few days before the first attack of riot police on peaceful protesters, artist Yevgen Samborsky, a member of the Open Group, and his friends Marta Lininskaia, Yaroslav Yakubovskii, and Pavel Osadchuk created a papier-mâché sculpture called Revolutionary, intended as a collective portrait of the protesters. It traveled with the artists around the barricades and was repeatedly knocked over by the police but survived and stood for weeks near the Trade Union Building, which was occupied by protesters and turned into their headquarters until it was burned down during the battle on the night of February 18.

(image) Revolutionary, created by Yevgen Samborsky, traveled around the barricades with the artist and his friends.COURTESY YEVGEN SAMBORSKY

Another attempt to inject art into the thick of the action was made by the group of anarchist-artists lead by Oleksa Mann and Ivan Semesyuk, whose usual gathering place is a fringe art gallery called Bacterium. Believing that their time had come, they decided to seize the moment. They built a roofless plywood shack close to the barricades, which they called the Artistic Barbican, referring to a medieval fortified tower. On its rough walls they exhibited works in the revolutionary spirit, such as an ironic image of Nestor Makhno, the legendary Ukrainian anarchist leader of the civil war period (1918–1921), along with anarchist slogans—“Freedom or Death”—in combination with expletives. It was a popular spot with both artists and protesters.

Not all the protest-inspired art had such rough political overtones. Lesia Khomenko, a young artist from the group R.E.P. (Revolutionary Experimental Space), spent many days on Maidan drawing conventional pencil portraits and giving them away. She says that her work gave people psychological support and at the same time “shows them their importance and demonstrates that what is happening now is history.”

Undoubtedly the most popular artworks inspired by Maidan were the performances. Mariyan Mitsik, a musician from Lviv, installed a piano painted in the national colors, blue and yellow, in front of the line of police guarding the presidential administration building, sat down, and proceeded to play Chopin. The image of the young musician seemingly unaware of the helmeted policemen in anti-riot gear became an icon of the protests.

Konstantin Akinsha is a contributing editor of ARTnews. Alisa Lozhkina is an art historian and curator in Kyiv.

A longer version of this story originally appeared in the April 2014 issue of ARTnews on page 34 under the same title.