Art in Ukraine Between Identity Construction and Anti-Colonial Resistance

Svitlana Biedarieva is an art historian, artist, and curator. She is the author of the book Ambicoloniality and War: The Ukrainian-Russian Case (2025), the editor of Contemporary Ukrainian and Baltic Art: Political and Social Perspectives, 1991–2021 (2021), and the co-editor of At the Front Line. Ukrainian Art, 2013–2019 (2019). She has published texts in leading academic journals and media outlets, such as October, Daedalus, Financial Times, and The Art Newspaper. She holds a PhD in History of Art from the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London.

• Preface; Introduction; PART I Solidarity; Chapter 1 Antagonism and Revolutionary Aesthetics: Ukrainian Contemporary Art between the Orange Revolution and Euromaidan; Chapter 2 Field Notes on Subjectivity: Art, War, Articulationl Chapter 3 From “The Ukraine Question” and “The Woman Question” to Self-Determination: Revisiting 1920-30s Mass Politics, Revolution, and War in Today’s Ukraine; PART II Identity; Chapter 4 (de)Construction of “Post-Soviet” Visualities in Contemporary Ukrainian Photography; Chapter 5; Large-Scale Exhibitions and Identity Building in Ukraine in the Late 2000s - Early 2010s; Chapter 6 Observing the Bodies: Examination of the Human Experience of War and Trauma; Chapter 7 Ukrainian photographers opting for truth: From Soviet documentary photography to Russo-Ukrainian war images; PART III Decoloniality; Chapter 8 Rethinking (Post-)Soviet Landscape through Decolonial Art Practices, 2014-2022; Chapter 9 Becoming Local: Decolonial Practices in Visual Arts in Post-Maidan Ukraine; Chapter 10 From Postcolonial Past to Decolonial Future: Ukrainian Art in the Ages of Revolution and Resistance (2014-2024)

Representative of a generation of contemporary Ukrainian artists, activists, and a cohort of academic scholars untainted by the trauma of imperialist ideology, freed of entrenched Russian narratives, and absent of the slightest nostalgia for a bygone Soviet era, this volume of essays offers fresh perspectives on the texture of a population and its culture breaking out of the clutches of colonization. Chronicling artistic events from the time of the dissolution of the USSR through the Orange (2004) and Euromaidan (2014) Revolutions to today’s persistent criminal assault of Russia on Ukraine, the contributions give rise to a new, inclusive, way of thinking about the history of contemporary art by exposing a society transformed by the extraordinary circumstances of postcoloniality and war.Myroslava M. Mudrak, Emerita Professor, History of Art, The Ohio State University