Rediscovering Jewish Memory in Contemporary Ukrainian Art: The Critical Visual Politics
Archive and Art: Jewish Heritage Research Grant, Kultura Medialna in partnership with DCCC Dnipro, UNESCO & European Union, 2026
Together with Lia Dostlieva.
This research project examines the re-emergence of Jewish history and Holocaust memory in contemporary Ukrainian art. Although Ukraine was home to one of the largest Jewish communities in Europe and witnessed some of the Holocaust’s most devastating atrocities, Jewish experiences remained largely absent from official Soviet historiography and only gradually entered public and artistic discourse after Ukrainian independence. Recent artistic practices reveal a growing engagement with this neglected past, contributing to broader debates on historical memory, national identity, and the ethics of representation.
(Sergei Loznitsa, Babi Yar. Context, 2021)
Aesthetics of Inaccessibility: The Remote Place-Making
The postdoctoral research project is conducted at the Institute for East European Studies at Freie Universität Berlin under the Humboldt Postdoctoral Research Fellowship.
Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Susanne Strätling (FU Berlin).
This project explores and defines the aesthetics of inaccessibility as an artistic practice that constructs visual relationships with territories rendered inaccessible through political violence, military occupation, or war. Unlike exile aesthetics, these practices do not require lived experience of the territory. Unlike documentary art, they do not rely on direct observation. Instead, they produce place through mediation, speculation, archival fragments, testimony, and distributed visual evidence.
My object of study is not memory, but the ontology of place under conditions of inaccessibility. Access can be treated as a legal or political issue, but I suggest it also has an aesthetic dimension: political restrictions reshape not only movement but also the conditions under which a place can be visualised. This project explores, through contemporary artistic practices in Eastern Ukraine, how place is produced when bodily co-presence is impossible. If place is relational rather than bounded, how can artistic practice establish a relation to a territory that is physically inaccessible and perhaps never experienced firsthand?
(Roksolana Dudka, Reflections, 2026. Photo credit: Roksolana Dudka)
In Transition: Rupture and Loss in Contemporary Ukrainian Art. The Case of IZOLYATSIA
The postdoctoral research project is carried out at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University, and the Institute for East European Studies of the Freie Universität Berlin.
Supervisors: Prof. Dr Susanne Strätling (FU Berlin), Dr Alexandra Vacroux (Harvard University).
IZOLYATSIA. Platform For Cultural Initiatives (IZO) was based at a former insulation factory site in Donetsk (Ukraine) and took its name from the original manufacturer. In June 2014, IZO was seized by the armed forces of the Donetsk People’s Republic, an event that forced the foundation to relocate to Kyiv. The site was turned into an illegal prison and filtration camp. In 2021, IZO’s managers decided to return to Donbas and open a new headquarters in Soledar, a small city in the salt-mining region. On the 24th of February 2022, the Russian Federation started the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, leading to the almost complete destruction of Soledar. I propose to analyse IZO as an institution that emerged from Donbas and was exiled from its homeplace. Recognising the crucial role Donbas plays in (inter)national imagery of contemporary Ukraine, I aim to analyse the centre’s activity, its post-industrial setting in the heart of Donbas, and how its mission, goals, and programming evolved drastically in response to the country’s political situation. The tragedy of losing space is also the tragedy of losing identity, it is not only a place that is lost but also its origin. My research goal is to examine IZO as a place (home) that has been lost multiple times. I plan to work with the concepts of home, posthome, homing, and unhoming, understanding home as a place of identity, community, and security. I am especially interested in the tension between continuity and rupture and in what lingers and what transforms.
(Soledar, November 2021. Photo credit: Ewa Sułek)
Space of Transformation: Contemporary Art Centres in Kyiv. The Case of PinchukArtCentre and Mystetskyi Arsenal
I conducted the PhD thesis at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń (Poland), the Faculty of Fine Arts, Cambridge Ukrainian Studies, and Harvard University’s Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute (Fulbright Junior Research Award).
Supervisors: Prof. dr hab. Jerzy Malinowski (Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń), dr Katarzyna Jakubowska-Krawczyk (University of Warsaw).
Tutor: Dr Olenka Pevny (University of Cambridge).
This research examines two major art institutions founded in independent Ukraine and located in Kyiv—PinchukArtCentre and Mystetskyi Arsenal National Art and Culture Museum Complex. These institutions represent contrasting organisational models, enabling a comparative analysis of their cultural, architectural, and ideological trajectories. I approach both institutions as spaces shaped by postcolonial and post-Soviet transformation, asking how decolonisation processes have been articulated within their cultural and narrative politics and whether they actively confront the legacy of the colonial past.
My central focus is the curatorial and institutional narratives these art centres produce and how their architectures and spatial configurations function as sites of meaning. The project’s overarching aim is to understand the nature and extent of decolonisation processes in Ukraine after 2014. Building on postcolonial scholarship, especially the work of Homi Bhabha and Leela Gandhi, I argue that the developments in contemporary Ukrainian art after 2014 constitute a postcolonial turn: a movement grounded in therapeutic engagement with history and acceptance of the past in its hybrid, non-hierarchical form. I propose that these transformations signal the first steps toward post-coloniality rather than a reversion to neo-colonial structures.
(Obabich, Mystetskyi Arsenal, 2019. Photo credit: Ewa Sułek)