Battle tells many tales, and that is certainly one of them. On 5 April 2025, artist and soldier Marharyta Polovinko was killed whereas serving on the frontline of Russia’s full-scale conflict towards Ukraine. She was 31 years previous. Her loss of life is certainly one of lots of of 1000’s on Russia’s palms. And but it’s a blow that feels each devastatingly private and tragically symbolic for the Ukrainian cultural neighborhood, the place I’ve been lively for the previous decade as a up to date artwork curator.
Sleeping within the Trenches, 2024, Marharyta Polovinko. Picture courtesy of the artist
I didn’t know Marharyta effectively. We noticed one another occasionally at openings, the place we would share a pleasant phrase, and adopted one another on social media. But her loss of life struck with the intimacy of a mirror shattering. Mourning her, I realized we have been born on the identical day in 1994.
There’s a terrifying closeness on this coincidence. I acquired information of her loss of life whereas serving within the Ukrainian military myself, having been known as up a month earlier. Being mobilized provokes complicated emotions. I’m a 31‑yr‑previous male citizen of a rustic at conflict. I’m a local of Luhansk, a metropolis in Ukraine’s east that has been occupied by Russia since 2014. My household fled when Russian troops took management of the town. At the moment, I used to be learning in Kyiv and have by no means had the prospect to return dwelling since. After three years of full-scale conflict, I’ve all the time been morally prepared to hitch the military. But I didn’t volunteer for navy service. My spouse and I’ve been elevating our small baby collectively. Supporting her profession, I’ve typically taken on the function of major caregiver. Nonetheless, the state determined it wanted me to serve, and I settle for that call – although it pains me to be away from my household. I hope to repay my debt to folks like Marharyta who purchased us time.
That is blood, that is ache, that is struggling
Earlier than the conflict, Marharyta Polovinko painted her native Kryvyi Rih and the delicate figures of post-industrial society. A graduate of the Nationwide Academy of Superb Arts and Structure in Kyiv, she created considerate, typically uncooked portraits of life on the peripheries. Her 2019 portray Three Graces of Urbanization, constituted of gouache, charcoal, stones and paper, captured not an idealized muse however the burdened fantastic thing about life amongst slag heaps, psychiatric clinics and collapsing concrete. In certainly one of her most haunting items Kryvyi Rih Residents Close to the Evening Shelter, she revealed not solely the aesthetic of the margins but additionally their dignity.
Just like the work of different Ukrainian artists, Polovinko’s artwork mutated in 2022. She started to attract compulsively. Her supplies turned symbolic: drawings made with pens drained of ink, even with blood, to convey the uncooked and unfiltered ache of her era. ‘Art came to me where it was most unbearable without it,’ she mentioned in a 2023 interview. However she additionally admitted that her conflict drawings felt unshareable: ‘This is blood, this is pain, this is suffering. It’s a fabric that has no place. I don’t need it to exist.’
Nonetheless, she stored drawing – at the same time as she volunteered to evacuate wounded troopers in frontline medical autos. She drew throughout breaks between missions in Mykolaiv and Kherson. Her work began to replicate not simply the collective horror of the information but additionally deeply private recollections, portraits of comrades, of loss of life, of survival.
By the point she died, Polovinko had joined the Ukrainian military as a soldier. Her comrades bear in mind her as brave, trustworthy and steadfast – an individual who ‘did more than what was asked’. She was killed throughout a fight mission with a weapon in her palms – with dignity. She was buried on 11 April in her hometown, Kryvyi Rih, on the Alley of Glory.
Marharyta Polovinko, soldier of the 2nd Mechanized Battalion of the third Separate Assault Brigade. Picture through Instagram
A era on the sting
In an earlier essay about the potential of returning to my native Luhansk, I wrote: ‘Violence in Ukraine is an all-encompassing logic brought to our country by Russia. Before we talk about rebuilding, we must understand that the return will be led by soldiers, by partisans, by those who first reclaim the land.’ That assertion was constituted of a place of theoretical distance. At this time, I rewrite it from inside this logic itself – and from throughout the grief that it produces.
Even earlier than I used to be mobilized, I sensed a brand new feeling amongst my era. We have been raised within the Nineties with the idea that freedom had already been gained. However over the previous decade, as we entered maturity, we have been pressured to study what it means to combat for dignity. At this time, as our cities burn and our family members fall, we see that the battle is much from over. With that realization comes not solely grief but additionally a deep, generational sorrow. A sorrow that comes from watching your friends fall – not in an accident or to illness however from missiles and bullets.
My era of cultural employees is being remade by loss. Like those that resisted Soviet oppression and paid with their lives for writing within the Ukrainian language or carrying the nationwide concept, we’re studying to inscribe our defiance and can into historical past. This conflict is forging us – its tough struggling, which in itself is leaving an indelible mark, is being remodeled into an urgency to talk and bear in mind.
Via this conflict, cultural manufacturing in Ukraine continues as a testomony to the enduring worth of artwork within the face of destruction. Ukrainian artists, writers and thinkers proceed their work, even because the conflict renders their practices more and more precarious. We’re studying bear in mind, how to withstand, and converse in a language that carries each the burden of the previous and the urgency of now.
On this context the exhibition Relating to the Ants’ Burrow Earlier than the Rain, which I just lately co-curated with my spouse Oleksandra Pogrebnyak at thesteinstudio in Kyiv, tells tales of the delicate chance of preserving oneself amidst profound historic shifts. It explores the entangled relationship between modernization and the expertise of displacement, revealing how grand infrastructural and geopolitical tasks not solely reshape landscapes but additionally destabilize one’s sense of company and subjectivity.
We started the opening with a minute’s silence. I wrote my opening notice whereas within the coaching camp and Oleksandra learn it to the viewers on my behalf.
When ethical readability issues
Polovinko’s loss of life is greater than a non-public tragedy. It’s an indictment. It’s a mirror held as much as a Western world that has grown used to trying away. A world the place geopolitical complexity too typically overshadows ethical readability. For Ukrainians, it isn’t non-obligatory. Ethical readability is lived. It’s buried within the cemeteries of Kryvyi Rih, painted in blood and blue ink on the frontline.
Don’t look away from Marharyta’s smiling face. Her loss of life shouldn’t be a footnote. Nor ought to she develop into simply one other identify in a conflict archive or a ‘fallen talent’ in some future exhibition on one other misplaced era of Ukrainian artwork. We aren’t a misplaced era but. However we’re in danger. Honour Marharyta. Honour Ukraine.
