by Behind a gate presided over by a taciturn doorman, on the Black Sea shores of Odesa, is a tumbledown ship repair yard. It is one of many industrial sites in Ukraine that fell into disuse after the fall of the Soviet Union, but in 2016 a community of young artists began clearing debris, restoring the old workshops and making studios.
Now, in 2024, when the city is regularly hit by Russian missiles, the city streets are empty of the tourists who once came to its historic center, there are only a handful of artists willing to withstand the constant threat to life.
Vasya Dmytryk is one of those artists who chose to stay, in his studio, a few meters from the shore, a cozy cave of books, tools and metal sculptures hanging from the ceiling. On his work bench was a copper-and-steel sculpture recalling the shape of a drone. His plan is to exchange it for a real drone: “We have a very direct mission as artists,” he said. “Raising money for the army.”
“I’m really rooted in Odesa,” he said. “The things I love and cherish are here. I felt like I couldn’t live without him.”
At the beginning of the full-scale Russian invasion, he actively considered whether, if the Russians came to occupy the city, he would stay “and try to protect the culture of Ukraine, or leave and try to put the culture of Odesa in present in other cities in Ukraine”.
His friend, the artist and curator Valeriia Nasedkina, said: “If everyone leaves, then what? With our presence here, we are claiming that we are still there.”
Nasedkina and her colleague Volodymyr Chyhrynets are curators at Odesa’s National Museum of Fine Arts, an elegant 19th-century neoclassical building in the center of the city. In November, a cruise missile hit just outside it, blowing out the windows, raining plaster from the ceilings to artwork, shrinking the street and knocking out the building’s administrative wing.
Most of the museum’s historic artworks were already safely gone. Dmytryk was part of the volunteer effort that began on February 24, 2022: he cycled to the museum at dawn to play his part in the month-long work of removing, packaging and storing the massive, closely-hung collection. defend. At the time of the November 2023 attack, the museum had a temporary exhibit with a few very large 19th-century canvases left on the walls — some of which were physically blown out of their frames by the shock waves, Nasedkina said.
Despite the attack, the museum is still functioning. Most of its elegant galleries are echoing and empty. “The last time it was like this was the second world war,” Nasedkina said. But some of the rooms have temporary exhibitions by contemporary artists.
One is a delicate botanical watercolor of wildflowers – viper’s bugloss, alpine flax, mullein – done on the Bakhmut front line by Borys Eisenberg, a former planter who volunteered on the first day of the full-scale invasion of Russia and killed in July 2023.
Another is by Dmytryk – a kinetic sculpture of nails from the boat repair yard, which flow and collide in complex patterns as unseen magnets underneath are activated. As they move, their rust creates a “drawing” on the sheet of paper they lie on – a metaphor, Dmytryk said, for the community of artists in Odesa.
A new exhibition is devoted to recent work by Dasha Chechushkova. A series of etchings, based on Goya’s critique of the follies of Spanish society, Los Caprichos, hangs on one wall. They were, she said, “a collection of symptoms of helplessness: depression and thoughts that most of the time we can’t express to anyone else. The work is about loneliness, about the outsider.” At this point in the war, she said, the gulf in the experience of Ukrainians – between those who volunteered to fight, those who did not, those who were bereaved, those who left – “which created the distance between people”.
One shows an exhausted figure, with text that translates as: “Since you can’t blame yourself anymore.” According to another: “A sense of calm turns the hero into a fool who doesn’t know what else to do.”
Chechushkova, who is 24 and currently based in Kyiv, studied in Odesa. Until the full-scale invasion began, she had a studio next to Dmytryk’s. There is a huge white dress, as if it were a shroud for a giant, suspended from the ceiling, and, at the end of the room, a chair and a table, gleaned from his Odesa studio, it seems, caught in a chunk of wall, the whole. covered with grey-white plaster, like a monument.
Her work was deeply rooted in Odesa, she said. The city had a distinct artistic heritage that includes the Odesa concepts of the 1980s and 90s, and the Non-combatants of Odesa of the 60s and 70s, who made art using “scavenged” materials, said Nasedkina, from the streets or flea markets, working outside the Soviet system and therefore unable to access materials or display their work in galleries.
“A year ago I was kind of apathetic, depressed,” said show co-curator Chyhrynets. “I felt that we don’t need art. One of the themes in Dasha’s work is guilt. Guilt hangs over art in general. Being an artist is a privilege.” But, after working on Chechushkova’s exhibition, “I realized that I had to do as much as I can what I’m good at until I’m used, and as long as I live,” he said. “That’s what our future plans look like: doing as much as we can in the time we have.”
