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When Russia launched its large -scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Voloshyn Gallery from kyiv has become a refuge for its artists and employees. The space had served as a bomb refuge during the Second World War – and it did it again. The artist Nikita Kadan lived in the gallery for more than two months, during which he was “interested in the way in which we can look at the history of Ukrainian art through the objective of this war”. Crossing works of art in the storage of voloshyn, he organized an exhibition entitled Tryvoha (Anxiety), with historical works by Ukrainian artists from the 20th century “who had a shadow of the disaster”, arranged around his mattress.
“Many things have become really obvious to Ukrainian art of the 20th century,” observes Kadan. “This art was done during revolutions and wars, almost each of our important artists of the 20th century had experience to survive a great historical disaster.” These include the October 1917 revolution and the war that followed, Famine Holodomore, the purges of Stalin, the Second World War and the collapse of the Soviet Union – which means that “almost no one has worked in completely peaceful times”.
Now, Kadan makes art on the effects of war, metal sculptures that refer to the attack on a playground where he and his daughter would play, to a piece of sound that evokes the implacable cry of air raid sirens. “It's not that different for my generation,” says Kadan. “It's like a mutation. We who live in war are changed. ”
When Ukraine was attacked in 2022, Max and Julia Voloshyn – who founded the eponymous gallery in 2016 – were blocked in the United States, after staying after a series of art fairs. Only a few weeks before Russian forces get up in Ukraine, the voloshyns had opened a pop-up show in Miami, The memory on his facewho presented older works on the conflict of their country with Russia – including the Oleksiy Sai Bombed The series, which resemble aerial views of the craters, began during the invasion of Crimea in 2014 by Russia and the Donbas.
The voloshyns have found another permanent gallery space in the Miami Allapattah district, which already houses a small cohort of galleries and at a distance from Rubell Museum. In addition to providing an American platform for contemporary Ukrainian artists, voloshyns are interested in building a dialogue between Eastern Europe and the Americas. In September, they will open an exhibition of Ukrainian artists from the 20th century and contemporaries organized by Kadan while revealing to kyiv an exhibition of artists from the United States organized by the artist based in Los Angeles, Harold Mendez.
They hope to bring Miami's show to Latin America at the start of next year. Julia Voloshyn explains: “We have some similarities and stories of colonial past.” Max adds that some Latin American countries are also “under Russian influence – and we would like to change this as much as possible”.
Many artists that Voloshyn represent facing the realities of a country at war. “I am constantly thinking how some artists in peaceful political climates can play freely,” explains Lilia Kudelia, the Ukrainian commissioner based in Dallas, who organized several recent exhibitions for the gallery. “At the same time, in other parts of the world, artists are struggling with what he feels living in this brutal new century.”
“People want to live as normal as possible,” says Max Voloshyn. When the couple decided to reopen the kyiv gallery in April 2023, they did not do it to earn money, he says, but rather “to support the local community and the inhabitants of Ukraine by continuing our program”.
“All this collected funds by selling art, it is not charity,” adds Kadan. “No, it's a very practical self-defense. We don't only do it for others-we do it for ourselves.”
“It seems crazy,” admits Max, “but in the country during the war, we can always sell art. The Ukrainians are so large and resilients, we believe in our culture and we think that we must support artists in Ukraine and galleries that still work. ”
When they started attending fairs in 2016, he said: “It was very difficult. Because almost no Ukrainian gallery has participated in fairs anywhere, nobody knew any gallery in Ukraine. So people did not know if ours was a good gallery or not. ”
This month in New York, Voloshyn will be the first Ukraine gallery to participate in Frieze, where Kadan will have a solo show, Kyiv sirenin the focal section of the fair. During the independent art fair, they will present the Albanian artist Abi Shehu alongside the Ukrainian filmmakers Yarema Malashchuk and Roman Khimei, who documented the experiences of Ukrainian children who were returned home for years after being expelled in Russia. Although Max Voloshyn recognizes that not knowing how collectors, institutions and the press will react “is always a risk”, he thinks that “now it will be a little easier for Ukraine galleries to apply to participate”.
“We want to speak through art and bring what is happening in Ukraine to a global discourse,” adds Julia Voloshyn. “And we think it is very important for artists, for us as a gallery and for Ukraine as a country.”
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