[women singing in native language].
- When you look back at history, what is left is usually art.
There are a lot of works in this exhibition
which discuss exactly this issue --
how to write the history, how to preserve any truth.
This show is supposed to, first of all,
present the best Ukrainian artists in the United States,
artists working in Ukraine as opposed to diaspora artists.
Several works in the show are created after February 24th,
but many of them cover the previous eight years of the war.
And that was our point, to explain that this war
has been going on for eight years
already and present deeper layers.
- In many ways, this war is about Russia
trying to erase Ukrainian culture as a thing in the world.
As such, these artists take it upon themselves
to contribute to the war effort
not only by supporting those at the front lines
with sales of the artwork and donations,
but actually elevating the profile of Ukrainian culture
and resisting the attempts to erase it.
- For the first piece of this series,
I created like exactly one month
after the full-scale war in Ukraine started.
- We've already selected Olia Fedorova's photograph
for this exhibition when I followed her on Instagram
and I noticed that she put on these poems.
Because of heavy shelling,
she spent the nights in the cellar of her building,
and she could not buy art materials.
So she started to write these poems on bed linens
with a felt pen.
- The aim of creating the first piece
was to express my anger and rage towards the enemy,
towards Russians about what they were doing
and doing still to my country, to my city,
which is still bombed very heavily.
So, I just put my feelings into a [indistinct],
some kind of a curse or something like that,
something ancient.
- I asked the artist if there is a way
to get this work to New York City,
but then the work was caught on the Ukrainian-Polish border
in some sorting center for about six weeks,
and we thought we lost it.
And I was all the time thinking whether the work will do it,
but I was also thinking whether Olia will make it.
What if the work arrives and she doesn't, you know?
It's very, very --
it's very difficult to work with material like this.
The work made it in June to Warsaw, and it got here.
- After 24th, when attack on Kyiv started,
we spent one day there hiding in a shelter with families,
being so shocked and disappointed.
Then, next day, we decided to escape.
We escaped to the west.
And this piece, it's my first work
after the beginning of the war.
It's my partner, Max Robotov.
I was curious how Max has changed
and what does he do if it's like --
I was full of stereotype what is being in the army,
and I was asking him if he make this gesture, for example,
and asked him to show me.
- Mostly I work with video and animation,
and I also do experimental movies.
The film they screened in New York
is assembled of many different eyewitness videos
and also archival footage from Donbas.
If I were to address American audience,
then I would propose not to be surprised,
because the surprise I see amongst the European audience
seems like another kind of irresponsibility
because this concrete war in Ukraine,
it unfolds into the endless lines of war
that we encountered for years,
back to Afghanistan and Syria and Iraq and Chechnya
and Bosnia and Pristina and endlessly backwards.
It is getting worse, in a way, and it will be getting worse.
Either we deal with it right now
or we keep playing the surprise every time.
- We knew that the exhibition will come in this low point
of interest, before big institutions,
museums could organize something.
So, we thought that this would help the war effort.