Art may not stop bombings or end suffering. But in Ukraine, it is not powerless. On the 27th anniversary of the signing of the Ukranian Constitution, CULTURED has arranged conversations with three Ukranian artists who, through their work and resilience, have condemned the war and helped the world bear witness to the violence that has become ingrained in their everyday lives. 

Before immigrating to Canada with her family in 2014, Sana Shamuradova Tanksa spent her childhood in the countryside of Ukraine's Podillia region, surrounded by rivers and forests. This upbringing had a profound influence on her art, which explores the country's history and mythology, the relationship between humans and nature, and the circularity of time. At 27 years old, Shamuradova will have her first solo exhibition, "Catching circles – then they match again," at Gunia Nowik Gallery in Poland, on view from July 1 through September 9, 2023. In this conversation, she shares intimate memories of leaving her country and returning years later to find it in the midst of war.

CULTURED: Could you describe your work?

Sana Shahmuradova Tanksa: I used to work with graphics, but now I mostly work in oils. I often use different surfaces, like found objects or pieces of wood. It started after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, when I went from Kyiv to the village to visit my grandmother. When I was there, I did not have any materials so I started just painting, using everything I had already seen and turning it into a kind of ritual that goes hand in hand with what I do on more standard surfaces. I work with the themes of family histories, collective memory, and the fact that there is a retraumatization in Ukraine now because there is an illusory distance between the present and the past. To a certain extent, memory is imagination, and very often you can remember only through imagination.

CULTURED: At what point did your hobby, if it was ever just a hobby, turn into a profession? 

Shahmuradova Tanksa: I really don't like the words "hobby" and "profession." If you take it seriously, you call it a job. I've never called it a hobby because a hobby is the other extreme. It's very dismissive. As a child, I was always drawing, and when I was preparing to go to university, I never perceived that the artistic path could also be a professional path. When my family and I immigrated from Odessa just before the revolution, I think I was depressed. I didn't realize it then, but because of the depression, I turned to drawing. At the same time, I was studying to get a degree in psychology, but I didn't want to take an academic path, so I didn’t go further. I got a bachelor's degree, left psychology, and continued to paint. I returned to Ukraine at 20 years old. I always wanted to come back to Ukraine and to Kyiv. Finally, my dream came true. 

CULTURED: What does a typical day for you look like? What do you wake up to, what do you do, what do you want for breakfast? How do you start working, studying?

Shahmuradova Tanksa: It's hard to explain to people who are not from here how it is in Kyiv. You cannot dismiss the situation and say that it is more or less normal, because the war continues, and the shelling continues, and things are very, very bad at the front. Lately, I've actually had very little energy. I understand that if something happens, whether it's very bad or vice versa, my mood depends on it. In the morning, I go to the workshop. If the workshop alarm goes off (there was a period when there was shelling every Monday), I go down to the bomb shelter, which is quite surreal because it was made during the Cold War. There are all these posters about preparations for an atomic attack. That is the process of reducing the distance between the past and the present that I try to convey in my work. 

It was very difficult to work in the winter because of the electricity shutdowns and shelling of the infrastructure. There is no common heating system at all, so everyone works with some kind of heaters. Because my workshop is quite spacious and it was cold, I was steaming from my mouth. I was painting with gloves on, and I spent two hours doing something and then went home because my hands and feet were frozen. So in winter, it depends on what time of the day it is. I can be quite productive; I can be not productive at all and very scared. I try to have this routine: donation, coffee, the road to the studio, the studio, meeting with friends. Now a lot of people have returned and it's spring, so maybe Kyiv will become more welcoming again. But there is no sense of time, so it's hard to even organize your routine in a normal, consistent way because you can't really control much.  

CULTURED: What small or large changes have taken place in everyday life? 

Shahmuradova Tanksa: Probably the perception of family and relationships in general. I'm very close to my grandmother, but we became even closer because of what we went through together. She supported me when I came to help her because she's alone in the village, and it turned out that she was the one who controlled the situation. The same happened with my father, who is very cold and reserved. It's very difficult to focus on individual problems because everything has become very collective and dual, in the sense that it’s either yes or no, or you’re good or bad, or you care or you just can't. When I left my apartment, I looked at it and thought I may be too attached to some material things there, like a pebble I found, or a shirt I embroidered, or a photograph. I thought, "Sana, now you have to quickly realize that the probability that you will never see these things again is high." The reconciliation with this fact took place when I left the apartment. This also influenced my everyday life and the way I started using these surfaces. I worked on them without a primer, and I did not think about how I would archive them. They may be preserved or they may not, and everything has turned into this “here and now” today. We value material things, but there is not such a big stake in them.

CULTURED: How your work and the way you work changed as a result of the full-scale invasion?

Shahmuradova Tanksa: There are events from the history and past family events that have become very relevant. I stopped being afraid of any direct references for my work, because it's clear that they all turn into universal images anyway. Also, I just started to turn to some very clear, direct images, such as the photographs of war crimes. I realize that no matter how hard I try to convey this image, I still get some very universal images and an independent image that doesn't even need to be explained. And this explanation only seems to emphasize the horror.

CULTURED: What are you working on now and what big exhibition projects have you done recently? What do you have planned for the next year?

Shahmuradova Tanksa: I just came back from Dublin. I was invited by a Polish curator to a production residency there. His focus is on agrarian and ecologic problems. I worked with the history of the Holodomor famine, where grains, the primary agricultural resource, were destroyed. The attack on the agricultural sector is a very classic method of our enemy, and it continues with what happened now in the summer with the sowing season. The fields are burning and grain cannot be brought out because the port of Odessa is being shelled. Farmers who are being bombed continue to do it all. It's as if it never ends. I focused on these works about sowing, about family stories, about these intersections of the present and the past.

These works will be at the Irish Biennale and soon there will be a group exhibition at the Art Arsenal. Recently, we had a very cool residency in Babyno in the Carpathians. It was just wonderful. We went to Kryvorivnia for Epiphany. This is the only church in Kryvorivnia that switched to the Gregorian calendar. You think, What kind of work can I do here if everything is done for me? So, in principle, I think many people in the residence felt that way, because we basically worked very fruitfully in terms of exchanging our thoughts and feelings of socialization. We exhaled a little bit, but it's still clear that the war is very close there, because a lot of people from there are fighting and dying. I think it was also such a great achievement to visit this residency in the assortment room of Ivano-Frankivsk.

CULTURED: Could you describe what you do in your free time?

Shahmuradova Tanksa: I'm always in the studio. I do see my friends because I really like to take myself to people's houses or workshops. I also like walking around because I love Kyiv, of course. I don't know much about the music there, but I'm always looking for new music. I am very, very inspired by the sounds. I also love going to the countryside to visit my grandmother. I try to go there often, so I'm always just walking around the same places, rivers, forests, and it always recharges me. Maybe there's some kind of collecting of visuals from the past, from the Ukrainian diaspora in particular. I also record dialects for my grandmother, and depending on what she is looking for, it leads me to some forgotten folklore of southeastern Podillia, the region where she is from.

CULTURED: What makes you excited?

Shahmuradova Tanksa: Nature and music because there are moments when I can really forget about what's going on. I’m excited when there’s some sound that really takes me in, even physically. I've also realized for a long time that when I see animals in the wild I'm flooded with this feeling that I don't need anything anymore.

CULTURED: Can you attribute this to inspiration?

Shahmuradova Tanksa: Not very consciously. We used to go to paint cows in the village, but I'm not going to paint that cow in realism. A shepherd guy once came up to me and said, "Show me," and I was ashamed to show him, because it's not like I painted a rural landscape, and then you think, What's the difference? In fact, these sketches of village animals gave me a lot. Now I realize that cows are the only animal, probably, that I can just draw with my eyes closed and get the proportions right. But goats, no matter how often I've approached them, I can't draw them straight. So I think that nature inspires me, but just not in a very direct way. It's very difficult for me to do these plein airs. I think that nature brings such a feeling of absoluteness that you can really forget about all this evil for a little bit.

CULTURED: What would you like people to know about life in Kyiv now?

Shahmuradova Tanksa: That the war is not over and that everything that is happening here now, whether it's some kind of exhibition, a daytime party, a disco, or something else, everything is dedicated to raising money for the army. We don't have any distinction between the army and the individual people who are fighting. Our acquaintances, friends, and many representatives of the cultural sphere are at the frontline right now. How many have already died? I just want to shout out how much it hurts. I'm very inspired by a lot of great volunteers who just devote all this time to fundraising. And I try to do my part too, whenever I can, to get involved. The war is not over, it's still going on here, and we all live in a constant search for what can we do to help.