Amid air raids and electricity shortages, a Ukrainian artist paints the Russian invasion
To look at Sana Shahmuradova Tanska’s paintings is to sense that something is awry, without quite knowing why. A series of canvases hanging in Artspace in Woolloomooloo as part of the Biennale of Sydney depicts strange, fantastical scenes that walk a line between Dionysian and dystopic: naked female figures in molten, fiery landscapes; mussels with moony faces swimming next to protean, fish-like forms; anthropomorphic suns weeping over rural landscapes.
Most of the paintings were created in the artist’s studio in Kyiv – some before Russia’s “full invasion” of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, and others immediately after. “That’s just how I keep track of time,” she says. “It’s like this line before and after.”
Shahmuradova Tanska started painting after what she describes as a “traumatic immigration experience”. In 2013, just after she finished high school, the artist, her mother and brother emigrated from their home in Odesa to Toronto, Canada. It was just before the Euromaidan protests of early 2014, a flashpoint in Ukraine’s ongoing struggle against Russian influence, that led to the ousting of the Kremlin-backed president Viktor Yanukovych and then Russia’s annexation of Crimea.
“I felt terrible because I really felt I needed to be back [in Ukraine],” Shahmuradova Tanska says, speaking in Sydney before the biennale opening in early March. “I got very depressed. I just started drawing, drawing all the time.”
While studying arts and psychology at university, she moonlighted as an assistant to the Toronto-based artist Darby Milbrath, learning how to stretch and prime canvases and work with oils, mixing them with solvents to achieve a washed look. Each summer break she returned to Ukraine, where her father and grandmother still live. Shortly after graduating in 2020, and as Covid struck, she decided to move back permanently.
In her home country she transitioned from part-time painter to fulltime artist. “I would try many things to make money, but [painting was] something I would always just continue to be doing,” she says. “Mentally, it was unavoidable.”
After the Russian invasion, artmaking became a compulsive response to trauma; a receptacle for experiences, memories, dreams and hopes, as she processed the acute stress of the early days of the war, then the ongoing anxiety of living in a war zone.
Two of the works in the biennale were made in her grandmother’s shed in the rural region of Podillia, where the artist retreated for the first three months of the war, which coincided with spring. One of the paintings shows a sheep and an abstracted figure sowing seeds, under a weeping sun, with a cross in the background – a mix of Christian iconography and mystical symbols that calls to mind the surreal tableaux of William Blake and Marc Chagall. “The sowing of the fields [that year] was disturbed by shelling, and we lost so much grain,” Shahmuradova Tanska says. “The sun is almost like this god: it stands for good things but, at the same time, it can’t do anything about what’s happening.”
The canvas is small. Shahmuradova Tanska explains that she left Kyiv in a rush after the invasion, packing only essential items and no art supplies. “I remember saying goodbye to my apartment for ever. I was like, ‘I have to accept the chance that I’ll never be back.’” Eventually, friends were able to send her a small supply of canvas.
She was able to return to the capital in the summer of 2022, and several of the most striking works in her biennale exhibit were made during this period, including a series of paintings featuring female figures in bright pink hues.
“I really tried to repeat the way I was working, and the palette, before the invasion. But it wasn’t successful: it was the same paint [and] the same pigments I would usually use, but it was something else, it was very hysterical – even though I was quite happy to be back … only now, looking at these paintings, [I am] realising what was happening.”
As she processed her trauma, she also came to see her art as a political tool, “one of the most credible ways to communicate what’s happening [in Ukraine]”. In 2022 one of her artworks was featured in a pro-Ukraine music video by Pink Floyd and, as her international profile has risen, via residencies and exhibitions, she continues to platform the country’s plight.
While she is in Sydney, Shahmuradova Tanska longs to get back to Kyiv. A normal day there involves an early start and a walk with her partner, who has a studio in the same building: a former scientific institute from the Soviet era. When there are air raids, everyone in the building – and many from nearby homes – shelters for anywhere between 15 minutes and several hours in its basement bunker, built during the cold war to withstand nuclear attack, the walls still pasted with hand-drawn instructional posters in Russian.
It has been two years since the invasion, and Shahmuradova Tanska describes a scrambled sense of time and identity, in which the boundaries between past and present, between individual and communal, have blurred. Waking experiences and dreams blend, and tales her grandfather told her about his experiences in the second world war resonate uncannily with things happening to her now. “There is no time distance between my grandfather’s trauma and mine,” she says.
This week Kyiv is being pounded by Russian missiles again. Over email, Shahmuradova Tanska writes: “Another example of this vivid feeling that past and present are merging: the arts academy that was partially destroyed by a Russian missile yesterday [the Kyiv State Academy of Decorative and Applied Arts and Design] was founded by Mykhailo Boychuk, back in 1917; he was executed by NKVD [the predecessor to Russia’s KGB] together with his students in 1937 simply for being Ukrainian artists.”