Producing Feminist Discourses in the Debris of Destruction: Maria Kulikovska’s Response to War in Let Me Say: It’s Not Forgotten

Abstract

The Ukrainian–Crimean artist Maria Kulikovska’s artistic practice has addressed war in Ukraine since the Annexation of Crimea and outbreak of war in the Donbas regions of Ukraine in 2014. In 2019 she created the video-performance Let Me Say: It Will Not Be Forgotten that responds to the ways artworks and women’s bodies are targeted by derisive retaliation and physical attacks during periods of political instability. Informed by explorations of feminism in post-Soviet countries, theories of prosthetic memory, and destruction art of the 1960s, I argue that Kulikovska does not let the destruction of her artwork silence her, but, rather, she uses destruction as a strategy to take control of oppressive forces. In their place, I argue that Let Me Say: It’s Not Forgotten demonstrates subjective and complex ways of building resilient feminist presents and futures that overcome oppressive violence and testify to continual perseverance.

The Ukrainian-Crimean artist Maria Kulikovska stands naked, armed with a rifle. She proceeds to walk slowly through a lush forest, accompanied by a distant cacophonous soundtrack, when something in the distance catches her eye. Kulikovska crouches to the ground, raises her rifle, and shoots three times. Through a dissipating haze, sculptures of nude female figures with fatal gunshot wounds to the head, neck, and chest become visible. As Kulikovska stands amongst these sculptures, made of ballistic soap, it becomes clear that they have been cast from her own body.1 What would motivate Kulikovska to shoot her own sculptures, to destroy representations of herself? And what is the purpose of the surreal narrative in her video-performance Let Me Say: It’s Not Forgotten (2019) in which these sculptures appear?2

Kulikovska’s video-performance responds to an earlier event, one that she both remembers and reshapes for political purposes. Two of Kulikovska’s prior sculpture series—Army of Clones (2010–2014) and Homo Bulla (2012–2014)—were exhibited on the premises of Izolyatsia: Platform for Cultural Initiatives in Donetsk, Ukraine before war erupted in the region. Army of Clones (Figure 1) consisted of gypsum sculptures cast from Kulikovska’s naked body that were left outside to endure the effects of the weather (Kulikovska 2010–2014). Homo Bulla (Figure 2) consisted of ballistic soap casts of Kulikovska’s naked body, displayed amongst the crumbling industrial architecture on the premises of the art centre (Chervonik 2012).3 Let Me Say: It’s Not Forgotten recalls the moment when the sculptures composing the two series were “executed” by separatist forces as the region was occupied and declared the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) in 2014 (Kulikovska 2019b).4

In 2014, war erupted in Eastern Ukraine. Military forces from the DPR co-opted Izolyatsia, turning it into a prison, and destroyed any trace of its former occupants in the process (Izolyatsia in Exile 2019). Kulikovska’s sculptures were fired upon by militants who described the activity as a “shot at sculptures of a degenerative artist” (Kulikovska 2010–2014). Shooting Kulikovska’s sculptures functioned as a violent seizure of political, social, and cultural power by the DPR militants, aimed at erasing any aspects of society they deemed undesirable or threatening. The untimely destruction of Kulikovska’s sculptures without her volition suggests that DPR forces were not only attacking her artwork, but her position as an outspoken and critical female artist. In recent years, harrowing stories have emerged from former prisoners of what is now referred to as the Izolyatsia Prison. Unfortunately, the shooting of Kulikovska’s sculptures was but a foreshadowing of devastating events to come (BBC Ukrainecast 2024).5

At present, all that remains of the original gypsum sculptures composing Army of Clones and the ballistic soap sculptures composing Homo Bulla are a series of photographs captured by staff from Izolyatsia (Kulikovska 2010–2014). These documents were created over several years and capture how the sculptures from both series gradually decayed when left exposed to the elements. The photographs of Army of Clones document how the medium of gypsum disintegrated; in some instances, the sculptures lost their structural integrity and lay amputated, decapitated, and truncated on the ground. The sculptures composing Homo Bulla demonstrated their decay through a different process; the surface of their bodies began to erode first, bubbling, peeling, cracking, only then caving in and separating at the seams while remaining standing amongst crumbling cement enduring a similar fate. These sculptures initially strike an uncanny resemblance to one another, casted in multiples from the female body of artist Kulikovska, but they morph into individuals as they stand exposed and weather at their own pace.

Created exactly five years after these sculptures were shot by DPR forces, Let Me Say: It’s Not Forgotten functions as both a response to and commemoration of the shooting of these sculptures. Kulikovska shapes the video-performance in this manner by replicating the act of destruction that occurred against her volition by her own hand. The gunfire directed towards her sculptures as an ideological statement by the DPR militants contrasts her own engagement with destruction as an artistic strategy. Within the context of the performance-based work Let Me Say: It’s Not Forgotten, or the gradual weathering and disintegration of the sculptures that compose Army of Clones and Homo Bulla, Kulikovska demonstrates how artists can explore various strategies and dimensions of the destructive act. By channeling destructive energy in a responsive capacity, Kulikovska allows viewers to witness this moment deeply embedded in her personal life, and, by extension, the lives of many citizens continuously experiencing the devastating effects of war.

The relationship between the “execution” of Kulikovska’s sculptures by DPR forces and her co-opting of the means of destruction within Let Me Say: It’s Not Forgotten visualizes the interplay of memory, power, and gender during a period of conflict. I suggest that memory and narrative are important considerations when exploring artwork created in a context where the artist is deeply intertwined and affected by political turbulence. I demonstrate this by analyzing Kulikovska’s video-performance alongside interviews with the artist herself, her biography, and personal essays. I argue that, within Let Me Say: It’s Not Forgotten, Kulikovska articulates a feminist position that centres upon the navigation and subversion of power relations by expanding upon the subject of the survivor and what can be gleaned from the creative ways one perseveres in the face of adversity.6 Her interpretation of feminism is rooted within the dynamics of memory—how events are recollected and how the strength of previous generations informs the present. It is emphasized by the clever ways Kulikovska reinterprets destruction in relation to the ever-shifting power dynamics that allow survivors to resist and reshape their realities.

1. The Trials and Tribulations of Making Sense of War

Before drone strikes hit Kyiv in the early morning hours of 24 February 2022, before Russian forces massacred people in Bucha, Irpin, Izium, and Mariupol (and countless other towns and cities), before millions of people were displaced from their homes across eastern, southern, and central Ukraine, Ukrainian citizens had already experienced years of destruction, exile, and displacement. Following the Revolution of Dignity that ousted Russian-backed president Victor Yanukovych in late February 2014, Russia responded with the annexation of Crimea, and, later, in March 2014, armed Russian-backed separatists seized control of Donetsk and Luhansk in the Donbas region of Eastern Ukraine (Katchanovski 2016, p. 479). These events culminated in the displacement of roughly three million refugees from Crimea and the Donbas region, both internally and within neighbouring countries (Katchanovski 2016, p. 474). Kulikovska was one of these internally displaced individuals who was banned from returning to her home of Kerch on the Crimean Peninsula following its annexation by Russia (Kulikovska 2019a).

Maria Kulikovska considers herself an artist in “double exile” who, since war broke out in February 2024, has been living throughout Western Europe, producing artwork, and exhibiting internationally—from New York, to Romania, to Hong Kong. Her work continues to explore women’s bodies embedded within the socio-political contexts that shape how they encounter the world. She casts women’s bodies marked by violence, wounded, amputated, and, yet, infuses each piece with a tenderness that produces a stark visual contrast. Works such as Scars II (2022) and Table of Negotiations (2022) respond to and illustrate the continued bloodshed—stark reminders that war and death are an everyday reality in Ukraine. Viewed alongside countless photographs published throughout the last three years of dead bodies beneath a shroud with only a hand left uncovered, a foot poking out from a pile of debris, signifiers of a lost life, her works invoke an even stronger visceral and emotional reaction as these are no longer representations of symbolic violence or imagined horror—the artwork mimics real life (Reuters 2022).7

Since 2014, scholars have turned their attention to the arts as a platform that captures the complex nature of war and identity politics. For example, Yuliya Ilchuk analyzes the art and literature produced in the Donbas following the rise of separatism in order to present the complex history of the region without fostering antagonism between the western and eastern regions of Ukraine (Ilchuk 2017, pp. 256–57). Jessica Zychowicz (2019) has chronicled her experiences participating in the Donbas Studies Summer School that took place in the formerly occupied cities of Lysychansk and Severodonetsk—an initiative aimed at exploring the cultural potential of formerly industrial cities. Zychowicz (2020) argues that the arts engage an alternative medium to fracture the grand narratives of allegiance and open other possibilities with which to understand Ukraine (pp. 384–85). Focusing on the arts compliments and complicates quantitative sociological studies such as surveys that gauge the affiliation and identities of residents of the Donbas to Ukraine, Russia, or both along civic, linguistic, or religious parameters, similarly suggesting clear markers of identity that are more nuanced in reality (Katchanovski 2016; Sasse and Lackner 2018).The arts provide a powerful contribution to the discourse on the war in Ukraine as they privilege and humanize the complex reality of those living in conflict.

Kulikovska is one of many artists from the occupied territories that have led the artistic discourse on war by intertwining critique with subjectivity and lived experience. Alevtina Khakhidze has chronicled the war through gestural illustrations that both illustrate lived reality and express her personal commentary on the politics of the war. She received international attention with the drawings she produced of her mother’s experience living in Zhdanivka in the conflict zone—Khakhidze’s mother died while waiting in line to receive her pension—and the struggles of seniors who had decided not to leave occupied territories for various reasons. In her work, Kakhidze addresses what she describes as the structural violence of how ordinary people become casualties of war through poor access to resources, such as the long travels and lengthy queues seniors must endure in order to acquire their meagre pensions from the Ukrainian government (Humeniuk 2019). Several writers and poets were compelled to take the effects of war as their subject, illustrating the devastating and horrific realities.8 For example, the poem “ashtray” included in Lyuba Yakimchuk’s poetry anthology Apricots of Donbas reminds us that war has now affected Ukrainians for more than a decade (Yakimchuk 2021, p. 127):

no longer a building

no longer a home

to mom, to dad, to me

to the vegetables in the fridge

not a home, not a fortress

no longer of four walls

(barely even fit to be a suitcase

or a backpack)

now–a big

sooty

ashtray

for a god

who inhales smoke

and lets fruit flies out of his mouth

The poem begs the questions: her family home was destroyed for whom? For what ends? For an endless loop of self-destruction?

My research into contemporary feminist art in Ukraine contributes to the aforementioned discourse by taking the artwork as my central focus. Rooted in the discipline of art history, I analyze the interplay of the formal elements composing artworks in relation to the contexts the artworks function within and the artists’ biographies. I situate the artists and artworks as both responsive to and agents within the socio-cultural dynamics of contemporary Ukraine. They are not removed from the contexts they engage but are immersed physically and psychologically within them. Close readings of individual artworks in combination with considerations of context, interviews, artist statements, and exhibition catalogs privilege subjective and partial accounts of contemporary life embedded within artworks beyond what the artist may have intended. By suggesting that the artwork is a semi-autonomous cultural product—created by the artist but open to various interpretations—my analysis lingers in the messiness of social, political, and economic forces, defying binary understandings.9 Synthesizing my interpretations with Kulikovska’s story as an individual subject to the instability of contemporary Ukraine, Let Me Say: It’s Not Forgotten makes the effects of the conflict both visible and audible in partial, individual accounts.

2. Recalling Feminist Origin Stories and Contextualized Resistance

On a hot summer evening in late August 2019, I sat with Maria Kulikovska on the terrace of a café in Kyiv’s historical centre. Through our casual conversation, Kulikovska recalled how various political tensions within Ukrainian history have made her and her family subject to strenuous conditions beyond their control. She explained that she has been significantly impacted by the annexation of Crimea by Russian forces in 2014 and considers herself a Ukrainian–Crimean artist in exile (Kulikovska 2019a). As a result of being an outspoken, critical, female artist engaging in feminist and LGBTQIA+ issues, Kulikovska is listed as a terrorist and person dangerous to society within Crimea, a “degenerate and forbidden artist” in the self-proclaimed Donetsk Peoples’ Republic, and banned from entering Russia. In her interview with Jessica Zychowicz and Juliet Jacques, Kulikovska described how she is forbidden from returning to Crimea due to a performance she enacted with Swedish artist Jacqueline Shabo. Kulikovska and Shabo collaborated and wed in a legal same-sex marriage ceremony as art performance in response to various bills tabled by the Yanukovych regime in 2013 such as a law to prevent the spread of positive information about homosexuality. In Crimea, Kulikovska is subject to Russia’s homophobic laws restricting homosexual propaganda that transferred to Crimea upon annexation and prevented her from returning home (Jacques 2019). She has been physically displaced by political power plays and symbolically told she should not occupy space, not exist, through the shooting of her sculptures. These events left Kulikovska feeling conflicted about her identity as a Ukrainian citizen not protected or supported by the government when we spoke in 2019. However, as our conversation continued, she stated her determination to persevere in creating positive, creative spaces for critical engagement within Ukraine.

Kulikovska credited her rebellious spirit to her upbringing and dwelled on her family history throughout our interview. Our conversations centred around Kulikovska’s feelings of displacement and the tensions surrounding her identity. In them, she drew parallels to her parents’ and grandparents’ experiences of hardship while they were subject to tumultuous political conditions of the twentieth century. She explained how her maternal grandparents were Ukrainian dissidents, who, under threat of violence, boarded a train in Western Ukraine in 1956 and disembarked at the end of its route, settling in Kerch, Crimea. Her paternal grandparents similarly suffered during the seemingly unending years of political unrest and totalitarianism in the former Soviet Union. Her grandfather was a Bulgarian nationalist critical of the Soviet Union who spent time in the GULAG and died under Stalin’s regime (Kulikovska 2019a). By connecting the present to a lineage of facing and overcoming hardship, Kulikovska implicates the past in shaping how she addresses being exiled for her artistic–political beliefs and actions in the present. Recollecting her impressions of family history is a powerful component of Kulikovska’s feminist position as it identifies ways in which individuals defied systems of oppression in ways that were available to them. Her articulation of feminism is rooted in lived experience and the transmission of knowledge between generations, informing a feminist position that is subjective, multiple, and localized to the experience of everyday Ukrainians.

The root of feminism in personal experience was a common thread amongst the stories individuals shared with me during our conversations in Ukraine.10 When I asked Kulikovska about what feminism meant to her, she drew on the actions of her grandmother and mother in shaping how she came to understand her position as a woman in Ukrainian society. She tenderly described her grandmother in our conversation:

My grandmother lost her husband very early… she had three children, she was alone, and she needed to be strong. I think she is the best example of a true feminist. Kind, intelligent, sensitive, beautiful, strong, powerful… She is goddess… I always looked at her like the biggest person in the world. She was the example of how I would love to be. I didn’t know that I was [raised] by feminism. But she was building me up like a feminist.

(Kulikovska 2019a)

She emphasized how her grandmother’s strength and her mother’s ability to step into the traditional male role of generating the primary income as her father struggled with depression illustrated relationships based on equality and care. She explained that her grandmother always told her to value education, to be able to support herself, and not to marry young as women need to be fully formed individuals before entering into marriage (Kulikovska 2019a). Although her relatives may not have referred to themselves as feminists, they instilled values in Kulikovska that she has internalized as evidence of a feminist sensibility. The lessons learned by older generations and the way their actions have demonstrated strength and resilience were paramount in grounding Kulikovska’s interpretation of feminism.

Feminist activity exists on the margins of Ukrainian society—although the distance between the margins and the centre is constantly being renegotiated. Jessica Zychowicz characterizes how the term functions in Ukrainian society as “the perpetual placeholder, the “bad word” that slips off the page and out of the recipe, a stigma and stigmata, a dysfunctional overstatement, or just the unseemly choice of a transgressive woman—feminism” (Zychowicz 2020, p. 18). Feminism has multiple interpretations in Ukrainian society and its meaning changes depending on who uses the term in what context. It is a term that individuals are constantly in the process of defining and its parameters are widened, challenged, and attacked in the process.

The study of feminism in Ukraine began to emerge following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. During the Soviet period, state enforced communism declared the gender question solved as men and women were officially considered equal and provided with equal opportunities (Marsh 1996, p. 1). Following Independence, scholars and women’s organizations in Ukraine began addressing the diverse women’s and, later, LGBTQIA+ and men’s issues that had been neglected during the Soviet period, and exacerbated by the rapidly changing social and economic conditions of a capitalist system and national sovereignty.11 Despite scholars and some Non-Governmental Organizations addressing gender in their work through the 1990s and into the 2000s, an “allergy to feminism” percolated in broader Ukrainian society due to the widespread belief that it did not have application in the Ukrainian context (Kis’ 2013). Scholars, activists, community leaders, and artists have had to navigate how feminism can empower and liberate within Ukrainian society specifically—relying on Western European and North American models of feminism would not be sufficient. In response, feminist examples had to be found in Ukrainian history and the lived experiences of women, as evident in the work of Solomea Pavlychko, who studied Ukrainian literary greats Lesia Ukrainka and Maria Vilinska; and Oksana Kis’, who published several texts on women’s lives in the 19th–20th century and the lives of Ukrainian women in the GULAG. (Kis’ 2008, 2017; Pavlychko 2002). Between the Orange Revolution (2004) and the Revolution of Dignity (2014), the study of feminism in Ukraine increased as activist groups began occupying public space to bring gender issues to the attention of wider society. The most prominent groups at this time included FEMEN and Feminist Ofenzywa who frequently utilized art and performance within their demonstrations (Zychowicz 2011). Following the Revolution of Dignity, the discourse on the position of women and LGBTQIA+ individuals in Ukrainian society erupted as citizens have sought to have their contributions to Ukrainian sovereignty recognized with equal rights. As a result, a vibrant and urgent engagement with feminism has emerged as exemplified by a series of exhibitions by artist and curator Oksana Bruikhovetska and the establishment of the Feminist Workshop in L’viv, an activist and educational nonprofit, to name a few (Briukhovetska 2017). Maria Kulikovska’s work engages and contributes to the unfolding of a feminism relevant to Ukrainian women. She employs feminism as a strategy of critique and resistance in order to challenge authoritative political forces such as the Russian state, but also oppressive social structures that affect the lives of women, girls, and members of the LGBTQIA+ community. In both Kulikovska’s work and Ukraine more generally, expressions of feminism can be both overt and subliminal, drawing positive and negative attention, and linger in the tensions created by these interactions.

I gained my understanding of feminism in Ukraine by conducting interviews with artists, activists, and scholars in the summer of 2019. These interviews revealed that many feminisms exist in Ukraine as individuals forge their own relationships and interpretations of the term. However, feminism is generally understood within circles that accept its potential as “a social theory and the critique of patriarchy as an unjust social system and a movement that uplifts the status of women within larger society. Feminism is the fight for equal rights and opportunities for men and women” (Martsenyuk 2018, p. 7) Even within these circles that embrace feminism as a productive discourse, debates continually ensue regarding how feminism is put into practice. The artists and activists that I met in Ukraine elaborated on this basic definition with their own experiences and expressions within their artworks. Through these sites, they allowed me to learn about contemporary Ukraine through various critical feminist lenses.

The interpretation of feminism articulated by Kulikovska within her interview and her artwork sits in conversation with the discourse on post-socialist and post-Soviet feminisms. Kulikovska’s perspective resonates with Zychowicz and Swedish–Estonian researcher Redi Koobak’s articulations of feminisms in their own research in Ukraine and Estonia, respectively. Both scholars explore localized feminist positions within the lives and experiences of women, particularly artists and activists, through years of personal interviews and relationship building. Working within the interplay of transnational and decolonial feminist studies, they focus on local dynamics to counter the urge to compare events within their respective post-Soviet contexts to Western definitions of feminism (Koobak 2018, pp. 1011–12; Zychowicz 2020, pp. 16–17). This attention to an experiential feminism as articulated by Kulikovska similarly disrupts discourses that analyze post-Soviet feminisms in comparison with Western feminisms that position post-Soviet nations as ‘catching up’ Instead, Kulikovska’s articulation of feminism is “rooted in geo-politics and body-politics of knowledge, to know local politics of feminism”(Koobak 2018, p. 1011). It is a feminism located in stories and memories that pushes how we can define feminisms outside a dominant Western paradigm.

My impressions of the feminist stories I heard while in Ukraine are akin to the experiences Koobak and Zychowicz had conducting interviews with women in Estonia and Ukraine. Zychowicz notes that she has “encountered “feminism” as a signifier of borderlands, a useful heuristic, and…a “red flag” with which to index a range of debates involving theories of democracy, civil rights, economics, and violence” (Zychowicz 2020, p. 17). Furthermore, Koobak, as an Estonian-born woman living and educated in Sweden, noted that speaking with her sister who has always lived in Estonia that her sister’s “attitude comes across as confident and fiercely feminist”—however, rooted within experience rather than academic literature (Koobak 2018, pp. 1010–11). These interpretations of feminisms informed by practical strategies of navigation and resistance to a patriarchal culture are deeply localized and subjective as they blur the division of theory and practice, insisting that the two are mutually constituted when we listen hard enough.

3. The Cacophony of Memory

The black screen signaling the beginning of Let Me Say: It’s Not Forgotten dissipates and a subtle soundtrack carries the viewer into the forest where the narrative begins to unfold. A continuous cacophony of chirping birds, splashing water, twigs breaking underfoot, and the subtle chorus of women’s voices accompany the video-performance. A persistent indiscernible haze undulates within the dynamics of the narrative, enveloping the trees, Kulikovska’s body, and the sculptures (Figure 3). These two elements create an air of uncertainty within the video and simultaneously establish a cyclical quality to the narrative. The sound and floating atmospheric effects are continuous throughout the video-performance, ebbing and flowing, as the narrative reaches a climax. When Kulikovska becomes poised to shoot, the disembodied women’s chorus crescendos as the haze intensifies. Once Kulikovska pulls the trigger, the screen becomes enveloped in the haze, disorienting the viewer, and encouraging them to wonder whether this is smoke from the gun. The sound of women’s voices once again audibly emerges in the soundtrack as the haze or smoke begins to clear and reveals Kulikovska standing amongst her sculptures. The voices fade in and out as the video-performance concludes with the haze floating in a clearing between two trees.

The dynamic visual and audible quality of the floating atmospheric haze, the dissonant, layered soundtrack, and the element of repetition, in addition to the title itself, suggest the interplay of memory within Let Me Say: It’s Not Forgotten. These elements create a surreal quality to the narrative as the viewer is left trying to discern the audio and visual elements without being able to reach a clear resolution. The recurring elements in the video-performance suggest a cyclical temporal element to memory that oscillates between remembering and forgetting, being able to discern and becoming lost in the overlapping sights and sounds. The birds and the mist do not suggest the passage of time as linear demarcations of past, present, and future, but, rather, collapse time, suggesting that the past, present, and future are bound into one another within the realm of memory. The continual sound of birds and the sight of mist are circular elements within the form of the video that provide a setting for the narrative to take place while remaining present as the action unfolds. They index an ever-present past that cannot be escaped or forgotten. Even within the recesses of memory, the past and present collapse into one another, as evidenced by the re-enactive quality of the video-performance: the video-performance makes explicit our implicit experience of the past as being re-lived and encountered continually.

Kulikovska engages with the past as she produces a video-performance founded on the principles of recreation and repetition.12 Connecting Kulikovska’s intimate relationship to the destruction of her sculptures and the lineages of conflict experienced by generations of individuals such as Kulikovska’s family, the sights and sounds within the setting of the video-performance become indicative of the complex temporal nature of memory (Figure 4). The element of repetition within the structure of the video-performance reinforces the cyclical nature of memory as the past is continuously re-enacted and referenced by the presence of Kulikovska and her sculptures. Similarly, the element of repetition is present within the video-performance through the ringing out of three shots, and the presence of a series of five female sculptures molded from Kulikovska’s body. The visual repetition of Kulikovska’s body creates an uncanny image where the artist stands next to multiples of her body that have been fatally wounded by her own hand.13

When I met with Kulikovska, our conversations often drifted into the recollection of memories, reflecting how these moments have shaped our present perspectives. Let Me Say: It’s Not Forgotten functions as a visual manifestation of this process by re-enacting a formative moment from Kulikovska’s past—the execution of her sculptures—drawing on affective recollection and reinterpreting the traumatic event to take it back from the control of DPR militants. Let Me Say: It’s Not Forgotten commemorates the moment when Kulikovska’s sculptures were shot. It does this by physically recreating this moment; however, this time, with herself behind the scope of the rifle. This act of self-destruction suggests an embodied reliving of the past in order to renegotiate the power inherent in this act and redefine the meaning of those shots.

Turning the rifle on her own sculptures, Kulikovska straddles the subject position of victim and perpetrator, complicating the power dynamics within the initial act of violence by proxy against her body. The video-performance draws on an understanding of power as fluid, articulated by Foucault (1990) as follows:

Understood in the first instance as the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate and which constitute their own organization; as the processes which through ceaseless struggles and confrontations, transforms, strengthens or reverses them.

(p. 92)

In other words, power is not a singular, linear force directed unidirectionally. Foucault suggests that there are always several forms of power at play in a single relationship and that these forces are in constant negotiation and renegotiation with one another. Within Let Me Say: It’s Not Forgotten, Kulikovska shifts the power from the oppressive DPR militants by re-enacting this moment, and, by extension, the Russian forces who annexed Crimea, and takes control of how the past shapes her present and future. She insists on remembering, and reliving this event, and she has the power to decide how it shapes her.

Alison Landsberg’s theory of prosthetic memory provides a telling lens to explore the powerful way memory functions within Let Me Say: It’s Not Forgotten. Though Landsberg conceptualized her theories on prosthetic memory by analyzing the prevalence of mass media and consumer culture in the 21st century, her argument regarding the experiential power of these media can be applied to Kulikovska’s artwork as the video-performance is in an accessible digital form. Within her text Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (Landsberg 2004), she defines prosthetic memory as follows:

Prosthetic memory emerges at the interface between a person and a historical narrative about the past, at an experiential site…in this moment of contact, an experience occurs through which the person sutures himself or herself into a larger history…the person does not simply apprehend a historical narrative, but takes on a more personal, deeply felt narrative about a past event through which he or she did not live.

(p. 2)

Prosthetic memory refers to the creation of memories that are not necessarily one’s own or related to something one experienced firsthand, but, rather, experiences mediated through technologies such as television, film, museums, and, in this instance, artwork. Because a historical narrative—regardless of the authenticity of its representation—is recreated in an affective, visceral manner, it allows individuals to form an account of the event and embed it into their own recollections. These events become memorialized as they are recalled and implicitly or explicitly shape how one acts, thinks, or relates to those like or unlike oneself (Landsberg 2004, pp. 2–3). Let Me Say: It’s Not Forgotten is a site with the potential to become a prosthetic memory in the way it recreates an event with space for the viewer to embed themselves into the video-performance.

When Kulikovska shoots the casts of her body in the video-performance, she simulates the act of violence by proxy against her own body demonstrated by the DPR forces and presents the impact of this event to a vast audience. Even though Kulikovska was not physically present when her sculptures were executed, Kulikovska was deeply affected by the knowledge of this event. Her response and relationship to this event constitute the memory that Kulikovska continually relives and revisits in her artwork. The memory that Kulikovska allows the viewer to suture, to use Landsberg’s term, onto themselves is the trauma of the aftereffects of the event she did not personally witness but recreates in Let me Say: It’s Not Forgotten.

Memory has two functions within Let Me Say: It’s Not Forgotten. On one hand, the video-performance sutures Kulikovska’s presence into the original moment when her sculptures were shot, evident by the interplay between her own body and the multiple casts of her body. The video-performance is an interpretation of an event recounted to her but that she experiences by proxy through her artwork. Recreating the event presents viewers with the possibility to relate to the trauma with which Kulikovska apprehended this destructive moment, and then develop their own prosthetic memory of the event as she interpreted it. The personal and interpretive nature of the piece does not hinder the authenticity or potential impact of the video-performance as Landsberg argues that because “images and narratives of the past are mediated through the cultural, political, and social worlds of people, they have the potential to affect a person’s subjectivity… what matters is not the source of the memories but how they are invoked and used” (Landsberg 2004, p. 146). The prosthetic memories potentially formed by viewing the video-performance are based on the reception of Kulikovska’s interpretation of the violence occurring in the occupied territories of Ukraine. The ways Kulikovska chooses to compose the video-performance and depict the trauma of the event are what carry the potential to affect the viewer.

On the other hand, by presenting a narrative representation of these events to an audience who may form their own prosthetic memory, Kulikovska demonstrates the power of the past in shaping individuals in the present and future, in a similar way as she has been shaped by this event. She not only draws on the formative nature of the original event for herself as an artist and woman but suggests, through the video, that this moment has the power to shape audience responses to the devastation of war. Let Me Say: It’s Not Forgotten functions as a plea through a subjective account to remember those enduring the seemingly endless power play of conflict that has left Kulikovska and many like her displaced and unable to return home. She repeats the event when her sculptures were shot to recall the effects of war, and the conditions that have left millions displaced, killed, or left suffering. Through representing this event for various audiences that may engage with her artwork, Kulikovska’s video-performance has the potential to foster empathy as prosthetic memories are created. Landsberg emphasizes the significance of prosthetic memory as she argues that technologies of representation have ethical potential that contrasts the prevalent analysis of their role in desensitization and propaganda (Landsberg 2004, p. 33). She states that “prosthetic memory creates the conditions for ethical thinking precisely by encouraging people to feel connected to, while recognizing the alterity of the other“ (Landsberg 2004, p. 9). Let Me Say: It’s Not Forgotten demonstrates the physical and emotional toll of war through Kulikovska’s account and, in doing so, allows viewers to embed themselves in the dynamics of conflict and put themselves in her position. While some viewers may recall similar experiences of their own, others may embed this prosthetic memory in the recesses of their mind, shaping how they act in the present and future.

Let Me Say: It’s Not Forgotten visualizes the nuances of memory through the interplay of visual elements and provides viewers with their own prosthetic memory, with the result that memories are resituated as forms of potential resistance. Just as Kulikovska takes control of the trauma embedded in her past by taking the rifle into her own hands, memories—lived or prosthetic, or ‘felt’ in Landsberg’s words—can be refashioned in subjective ways to live better with one another (Landsberg 2004, p. 33).14 When memories are not limited to one’s lived experience, they can become appropriated by individuals from various positions to “become the grounds for political alliances and the production of new, counter hegemonic public spheres” (Landsberg 2004, p. 34). In the context of contemporary Ukraine, room for this possibility is significant as opening oneself up to memories that are not one’s own allows for individuals to empathize with the suffering of neighbours who are not like oneself. It allows individuals to consider the shared humanity of suffering, surviving, and rising above to break down antagonism and seemingly insurmountable differences.

Let Me Say: It’s Not Forgotten holds the radical potential to encourage empathy across differences by implicating the viewer and allowing them to participate in the unfolding narrative through distinct cinematographic choices. When the video-performance begins, the camera follows Kulikovska from behind as she slowly walks through the forest armed with a rifle. The viewer can insert themselves into the scene in alliance with Kulikovska, searching for an unknown target. The position of the viewer then changes as they find themselves facing the barrel of Kulikovska’s rifle when three shots ring out and the screen is enveloped in smoke. Just as suddenly as the viewer oscillates from the hunter to the hunted, the perpetrator to the victim, they are divorced from the narrative and apprehend Kulikovska standing among the five sculptures she shot from a distance; however, Kulikovska does not leave the viewer off the hook. She stares at the viewer, meeting and challenging their gaze in the final seconds of the video-performance before the camera rests on the space between two trees where the narrative had occurred only moments before. The instances when Kulikovska points her rifle at the viewer and meets their gaze in the video-performance bring the viewer into the narrative as they can no longer only reflect on what they have seen; they have now been confronted by Kulikovska and are involved in the action. Their subject position, much like Kulikovska’s, oscillates between being shot at by proxy, and being posed to shoot, while also being accused of participating in the pattern of violence by Kulikovska’s gaze. The ways that Kulikovska invites the viewer to occupy various subject positions in the narratives can help to form a more empathic prosthetic memory as “[the viewer] is engaging in the process of meaning making, which both connects the narrative to [the viewer’s] world and transmits images from the world to [Kulikovska’s] narrative… because [the video-performance] speaks to her personally, she leaves with a more intimate connection to… the traumatic historical event” (Landsberg 2004, p. 145). Let Me Say: It’s Not Forgotten encourages an association with the various subject positions Kulikovska invokes in her recreation of the traumatic event, forcing the viewer to make sense of this violence from more than one perspective.

The video-performance encourages a form of empathy that challenges the structures that have led to conditions of suffering rather than merely identifying with the suffering of victims. Megan Boler articulates this important distinction as the difference between passive empathy and testimonial reading. She argues that “passive empathy absolves the reader through the denial of power relations”, by allowing them to apprehend atrocities from a safe distance where the reader or viewer is not implicated in the narrative (Boler 1997, p. 261). In contrast, “rather than seeing reading as isolated acts of individual response to distant others, testimonial reading emphasizes a collective educational responsibility”(Boler 1997, p. 262). Testimonial reading, as encouraged in the video-performance as a site to form prosthetic memories, challenges the viewer to consider not only the event, but why Kulikovska would shoot her own sculptures. She asks us to consider why some people are considered enemies while others are allies. What conditions allow these distinctions to come into being and how does the viewer either participate in these systems or rebel against them? Landsberg states that empathy “is more than a feeling of emotional connection; it is a feeling of cognitive, intellectual connection, an intellectual coming-to-terms with another person’s circumstances” (Landsberg 2004, p. 149). The viewer must actively consider and make sense of these questions and their own relationship to the war Kulikovska references. Active empathy is not limited to the moment the viewer apprehends the video-performance but transcends into their actions and interpretations of relationships, power imbalances, and injustices in the realities they encounter after the fact.

Let Me Say: It’s Not Forgotten provides a site for viewers to become shaped by Kulikovska’s past and reflect on their own. Viewers are invited into the piece through the fluidity of the gaze within the video-performance, but also through the word ‘it’ in the title. ‘It’ remains a signifier without a referent; without knowledge of the commemorative nature of Kulikovska’s work, the event that is not forgotten, ‘it’, can be filled in by the viewer. The viewer can recall elements from their own pasts that continue to impact their present and future. This invitation is further emphasized by the last scene of the video-performance where the camera lingers on the space between two trees (Figure 5). This scene, which emphasizes the ongoing presence of the mist and the birds by stripping away firm narrative elements such as Kulikovska armed with a rifle and the executed sculptures, allows a moment of pause and contemplation for the viewer. The viewer is invited to reflect on Kulikovska’s past and their own. In this final moment of contemplation, the ongoing presence of the mist and the sounds of birds serve as a reminder that this event has now become encoded into their own memories. They are invited to reflect on the memory they just formed by watching the video-performance. They must decide how they will incorporate the past into their future and the future of those they interact with—a future that is open to numerous possibilities.

4. Reveling in the Debris: The Productive Capacity of Destruction

Three shots ring out and the screen becomes enveloped in a cloud of smoke. As the smoke begins to dissipate, the upper body of a nude female sculpture cast in ballistic soap begins to emerge. The sculpture’s facial expression is calm, eyes closed, muscles relaxed. The figure is not engaging the viewer, but, rather, appears lost in her own world, neither refusing the gaze, nor confronting it; she exists as if no one were looking at her. Her arms have been cut off at the shoulder—she has witnessed the test of time and felt its effects, sitting in the forest like a Venus from antiquity. The striking peacefulness of the sculpture is disrupted by large round holes protruding from the neck and hip of the body. The edges of the holes are rough with the material that has become displaced from this injury. The sheer scale of these holes suggests fatal wounds; the statue’s peacefulness transforms from indifference to death.

The camera pans onto Kulikovska who stands in front of a terracotta-coloured sculpture, looking out past the camera. Her feet are shoulder-width apart and she holds the rifle across her hips. As the camera zooms out from the artist’s face, we witness her position among five sculptures all resembling one another; they only differ in the locations of their fatal wounds and colour of the ballistic soap used to cast them. Positioned amongst the sculptures that she has just shot, it becomes evident that Kulikovska and the sculptures share the same facial features and bodily proportions (Figure 6). By standing amongst them, she straddles the distance between victim and perpetrator. In shooting these material sisters, is she, by extension, shooting herself?

Kulikovska responds to the original moment when her sculptures were executed by DPR forces by turning this event on its head, harnessing the means of destruction, and turning the gun on her own artwork. Much like the militants, Kulikovska shoots her sculptures as if they are living bodies, aiming at the body parts where a shot would prove immediately fatal. This gesture emphasizes the affective power of destruction, recalling active empathy from the viewer for these sculptures that closely resemble the artist herself. Kulikovska addresses the period of conflict she is inextricably embedded within and harnesses this energy by deploying the power of destruction within her artistic practice. These strategies allow her work to sit in conversation with a larger discourse on destruction art.

Destruction art emerged as an artistic practice following the devastation of World War II, originating with the work of Gustav Metzger and Rafael Montanez Ortiz (Stiles 1992, p. 74). Just as Kulikovska implemented destruction into her artistic practice within a tumultuous socio-political context, similarly, Metzger, an Orthodox Jew who escaped Nuremburg for England in 1939, wrote his manifestos after studying art and participating in various political actions, especially Nuclear Disarmament in the 1950s and 1960s (Fisher 2017, p. 6). Within his manifestos, Metzger defines auto-destructive art as “art which contains within itself an agent which automatically leads to its destruction within a period of time” (Metzger 1960). It is an artistic form that is intentionally mortal, dynamic, and temporal and responds to a context where individuals are subject to the power of destruction and unable to harness it themselves. Auto-destructive art gives ordinary citizens, exemplified by artists, access to the capacities of destruction typically held and employed by governments and militaries—technologies that leave citizens subject to their effects (Metzger 1960). It is an artform that is responsive to the nature of destruction as the artwork is simultaneously created and destroyed, mimicking the human condition, while also rich with empowering potential. Citizens control the means of destruction, if only in the arena of the arts.

Auto-destructive art and similar destruction art tendencies positioned by Kristine Stiles function as responsive practices, much in the same way as Let Me Say: It’s Not Forgotten, to an increasingly militarized, authoritarian, and industrial global socio-political order. They harness the technologies, what I refer to as the means of destruction, employed by governments and militaries against the bodies of citizens within artistic practices situated in contemporary society in order to navigate a context shaped by tensions. These practices embody the tumultuous energy of a historical period while simultaneously critiquing it as “Auto-destructive art re-enacts the obsession with destruction, the pummeling to which individuals and masses are subjected” (Metzger 1960). Within Let Me Say: It’s Not Forgotten, Kulikovska takes up arms—the same weapon held by soldiers on either side of the conflict—against casts of her own body, transforming these sculptures into enemies by pointing and firing a rifle at their bodies. The absurdity of this act functions as a critique of militarization by suggesting the arbitrary nature by which individuals become victims of war. By firing at sculptures created in her own image and standing amongst them following the execution, Kulikovska questions what separates the victim and the perpetrator, and suggests the possibility that one can easily switch from one to the other depending on the context. Let Me Say: It’s Not Forgotten encourages viewers to identify across the divide of “us” vs. “them” by drawing on the aesthetic resemblance of the victim and perpetrator, the sculptures and Kulikovska, suggesting that the viewer look for commonalities over differences in a context of ongoing conflict.

The proposition to look for common humanity in difference engages another component of testimonial reading as proposed by Boler that brings both the viewer and the subject of the artwork closer together and further apart. She proposes that testimonial reading “pushes us to recognize that a novel [or artwork] reflects not merely a distant other, but analogous social relations in our own environment, in which our economic and social positions are implicated” (Boler 1997, p. 267). Apprehending the video-performance, or any form of media, requires that the viewer to consider how they are embedded within dynamics of power and systems of oppression and domination in their own lives. It does not collapse the subject of the artwork and the viewer, nor the victim and perpetrator, but considers their common vulnerability within social dynamics that are not static. Simultaneously, testimonial reading places the viewer as an agent with the power to choose how to engage difference in the present. In the context of Kulikovska’s video-performance, the viewer could be somebody closely affected by the war like Kulikovska, living its realities, or someone completely separated from the context. In either case, she implicates the viewer in the narrative with the capacity to choose how to act and respond to injustice.

Kulikovska poses viewers with a challenge as she stares at the camera in the final seconds of the video-performance: to question the polarizing nature of the war and to empathize with victims no matter what “side” they may fall on (Figure 7). These victims may be no different than the self, and their deaths were caused by conflict where victims are killed in an arbitrary fashion that could easily claim your own life. Embedded within the context of its production, Stiles expands upon the mobilization of destruction in art as activist art that visualizes transformative processes. She argues that destruction art addresses the relationship between individuals and the contexts they navigate:

Destruction art is about violations, those defilements continually perpetrated against the bodies and psyches of women and men. But, destruction art is not a utopic project. Rather it is a pragmatic one, enacted by artists who are profoundly sceptical but not cynical and who commingle responsiveness with reaction, and fear and loathing with great trust in the aggregate potential of art.

(Stiles 1992, p. 77)

Stiles proposes that destruction art captures the energy of destructive socio-political forces that exert themselves physically and psychologically on ordinary citizens and applies the devastating potential of these forces to the art object or performance. In this process, the energy behind these forces becomes visualized as the art object is obliterated and the destructive energy is redirected from the bodies of citizens onto the structures that instigated the destructive drive. Artists, such as Kulikovska, who utilize destruction in their art practice respond to the violence embedded in the contexts they navigate and illustrate the devastation of war to make visible and reroute the energy of destructive forces.

Destruction art is able to carry its emotive and affective potential because it visualizes the invisible forces of destruction, and, in the process, creates a productive space for affective engagement with destruction and its wide-reaching social effects. The act of destruction creates multiplicity, responding to the ideologies that subject bodies to destruction with the suggestion that an unstable, and fragmented reality allows space for diversity and contradiction. It breaks down and swallows tensions, producing fertile debris. By harnessing the destructive power of society within the video-performance, Let Me Say: It’s Not Forgotten transforms victims from an arbitrary mass of bodies into individuals who are all, as Judith Butler proposes, grievable (Butler 2016, p. 38). Destructive power is rerouted to sever unjust alliances so that “the subject that I am is bound to the subject I am not, that we each have the power to destroy and be destroyed, and that we are bound to one another in this power and precariousness” in order to forge empathy and solidarity across difference (Butler 2016, p. 43). Drawing on the simultaneous mortality and violence inherent within the human condition, Butler suggests the relationship of the body to destructive capacities as a space to forge relationships, recognizing that we are the same in our capacity to destroy and be destroyed to the same result: death.

The body sits at the centre of Let Me Say: It’s Not Forgotten as the location of empathy and identification, and survival and resilience, but also as the agent of destruction. The complex interplay of shooting sculptures created in her own image suggests both the blurring of divides and an act of destruction overcome. Even though replicas of her own body may have perished, her own body continues to live. Stiles argues that the body within artistic practice is a loaded site where the “ontological effects of the technology, phenomenology, and epistemology of destruction” relate to how individuals “negotiate the resulting crisis of survival” (Stiles 1992, p. 75). Stiles positions the body as central within destruction art because it is both an agent of destruction and the most vulnerable to destruction’s annihilating capacities. Destruction art is a response to this human potential of becoming a snake eating its own tail, a response to the ability for the physical capabilities of the body to be both victim and perpetrator, and a means to navigate these simultaneous tendencies. Through harnessing the violent capacity of destruction and repeating, recreating it, Stiles argues that destruction art offers the possibility of healing to a society of individuals perpetually surviving (Stiles 1992, pp. 76–77). Kulikovska embodies the simultaneous tendency of the body to both kill and be killed as she stands with the sculptures she has just shot, emphasizing the constructed nature of conflict and the power to stop it. Kulikovska recreates those initial blows by DPR forces in 2014 throughout her dynamic artistic practice; I suspect she will continue until we see an end to the war.15 In the process, she visualizes the process of surviving: constantly living with destruction to heal from its devastating potential.

I argue that the element of survival within destruction art centred around the female body may suggest an interesting position to explore potentialities for feminism within contemporary Ukraine. By considering how women tell stories about themselves and their families, I analyze what Redi Koobak describes as “the gaps, chance encounters, and tensions that… narrate feminism differently, to bring forth new ideas about feminism in this context”, focusing on a subjective, feminist response to war and displacement (Koobak 2018, p. 1012). Kulikovska embodies the position of both victim and perpetrator within Let Me Say: It’s Not Forgotten, suggesting a transference of power from her body vulnerable to violence in the form of a sculpture, to her living and active body. She illustrates the agency of the female body and suggests that, in adversity, one can find strength. The process of surviving is an act of rebellion in its relentless perseverance. In our conversation, Kulikovska emphasized how she came to interpret feminism by witnessing the strength of the women in her life in the face of adversity. Although these women may not have identified as feminists, they challenged and demonstrated how women can adapt various subject positions out of necessity and find empowerment within this process of surviving. Kulikovska embodies this notion when she picks up the rifle, suggesting the fluidity of power and the importance of this realization to considering feminism in Ukraine.

The shooting of Kulikovska’s sculptures that comprised Army of Clones and Homo Bulla by DPR militants was ideologically charged in order to assert their power over women’s bodies and deny those who do not conform the ability to exist within the DPR. Kulikovska described them as an execution, the symbolic killing of bodies and individuals that posed a challenge to order in the DPR, and a foreshadowing of suffering to come under their leadership. By destroying her sculptures, the militants symbolically established who could belong to society in the DPR; artists such as Kulikovska who challenged the regime were banned (Ilchuk 2017, pp. 256–73). Let Me Say: It’s Not Forgotten resists this mandate as Kulikovska refuses to conform to the position of victim and, instead, survives by harnessing the technology of oppression to critique it. This refusal to accept the power and authority of the DPR within her video-performance empowers herself as she stares at the viewer, meeting their gaze, in confrontation and challenge. She challenges them to resist the authority of militarization and, instead, rebel, thereby creating the following situation:

One is dealing with mobile and transitory points of resistance, producing cleavages in a society that shift about, fracturing unities and effecting regroupings, furrowing across individuals themselves, cutting them up and remoulding them, marking off irreducible regions in them, in their bodies and minds.

(Foucault 1990, p. 96)

The processes of surviving and persevering in creative ways constitute sites of resistance that challenge forms of domination and critique binary models of understanding by dwelling on the complexities of life. Although Kulikovska chose to express her resistance through the production of artworks that respond to and incorporate destruction, as evident in our conversation, she believes that this can be achieved in the concrete ways one chooses to live their life (Kulikovska 2019a). How we choose to live and respond, from the most mundane to the overt, are rebellious and political acts in themselves.

Taking advantage of the fluidity of power as a strategy of feminist resistance is evident within Let Me Say: It’s Not Forgotten as Kulikovska transforms from a displaced victim of annexation to an individual picking up arms in order to critique the militarist, discriminatory, and authoritarian systems that exiled her. The presence of her living body within the video-performance suggests how she has harnessed the power of destruction into the power of transformation. By employing and harnessing the means of destruction within her work, Let Me Say: It’s Not Forgotten suggests that destruction and production are inextricably linked. Where something is destroyed, space can be created for new epistemologies, in this case, a feminist critique, to take their place, and these epistemologies incorporate the debris to refashion them in subversive and surprising permutations.

Let Me Say: It’s Not Forgotten functions as a commemorative performance and response to the moment when DPR forces executed the sculptures in Army of Clones and Homo Bulla, except, in this performance, Kulikovska takes the means of destruction into her own hands. Kulikovska is compelled to repeat the original act of execution time and time again in order to transform the power of destruction and violence from complete annihilation into the productive grounds for overcoming, healing, and encouraging empathy across difference. The repetitive act of destruction suggests that, even by destroying the object itself, the memory and consequences of the act remain in the movement, in the gesture. With every shot on her sculptures, she takes control of an event that symbolized her position within the DPR and, by extension, to Russian forces—a disposable threat to their militarized order. The surreal narrative of the video-performance is an act of resistance and perseverance: she cannot be destroyed.

Let Me Say: It’s Not Forgotten contributes to the ever-unfolding feminist discourse in Ukraine by suggesting a particularly contextualized feminist position that empowers women by celebrating their strength and perseverance as they navigate adversity. The video-performance proposes a feminist position characterized by embracing the fluidity of power, reflecting on the past to forge alliances across difference, moving forward with empathy, and resisting oppression whether in large ways or small. A central component of this position suggests that the process of overcoming functions as a form of resistance where the individual expresses their agency rather than victimhood. By shifting the power relationships between individuals and the contexts they navigate, the act of destruction becomes appropriated as a productive force within Kulikovska’s work as it creates space to consider and re-envision the past–present–future within the debris of destruction.

5. Afterword

In hindsight, my analysis of Kulikovska’s work from 2019 may, at times, read too hopeful, too naive, when compared with the brutal reality of the expanded war with seemingly no end in sight. However, at a time when the global political order established after the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet Union is hanging by a thread, authoritarianism is growing, and the rights of women, the LGBTQ+ community, migrants, and people of colour are being threatened globally, including in the United States, Let Me Say: It’s Not Forgotten holds greater emancipatory potential. All that Ukrainians, women, and LGBTQ+ folks have fought for, continue to fight for, and will have to fight for even more vehemently cannot, and will not, be forgotten.