Safeguarding Ukraine’s culture of resistance

The Facets of Freedom exhibition, comprising works from the Grynyov art collection that were evacuated from Kharkiv to France, pays homage to Ukraine’s struggle for liberty, writes

When Russia started bombing Kharkiv a year ago, the building housing the Grynyov art collection, Borys and Tetyana Grynyov’s private collection of contemporary Ukrainian art, came under fire. Armed with only a few small boxes, hardly any packing material and a small van, Marina Konieva, the collection’s sole representative in Kharkiv at the time, had one goal: to ferry the art to safety. It was an extremely challenging process, one that required ingenuity and some hard decisions, like cutting some of the bigger pieces out of their frames and wrapping them in an old rug for transport. “Our works are masterpieces representing Ukrainian culture from the 20th and the 21st centuries, we had to evacuate them to save them for the future,” says Konieva from Kharkiv. Thanks to her heroic efforts, the collection was transported to Paris, where some of the works are on display in an exhibition titled The Facets of Freedom at the Cultural Centre of the Embassy of Ukraine in France (until 3 March). Here we are sharing five noteworthy pieces in the show. To Konieva, who curated the exhibition, and Viktoriia Gulenko, the cultural centre’s director, one thing is for certain: the move is temporary, and the artworks will find their way back to Ukraine.

Donetsk. Carte, 2013 Roman Minin

In this work, the photographer, sculptor and street artist Roman Minin, sets out to add a splash of colour to his home region of Donbas – normally characterised by the mining industry and the darkness that accompanies it. Prior to Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, Minin created works engaging with the concept of escape from Donbas, which proved to be prophetic of everything to come.

Vivre la guerre avec Klubnika Andriyivna, 2014-2016 Alevtina Kakhidze

The art of Alevtina Kakhidze – an artist, graphic designer, performer and videographer from Zhdanivka in the Donbas region of Ukraine – is not new to the cultural centre, which hosted her solo show in 2022. Kakhidze’s works in The Facets of Freedom exhibition, which take the form of a diary featuring both text and visuals, are part of a larger installation and performance grappling with a child’s quest for freedom as they age. “It’s not an accident that I did not hang her pieces in the main room but rather hung them along the stairs,” says Konieva, stressing that every single guest that comes to the exhibition goes up the stairs looking for the art, the way kids grow up looking for liberty.

Sans titre, de la série “Photographie totale”, 1970-1990 Yevheniy Pavlov

Bearing in mind that conceptual photography, with its reliance on potentially dangerous symbolism and metaphors, was strictly forbidden in Soviet times, it is not hard to understand why this collage by

Dans le musée 2, 2011 Maksym Afanasiev and Stanislav Volyazlovsky

When Maksym Afanasiev and Stanislav Volyazlovsky first organised an exhibition featuring live monkeys at the Kherson Fine Arts Museum in the early 2000s, a video of which is part of the Paris exhibition, it was perceived as funny and unusual. “Today, we observe this video from an absolutely different angle because this museum was burglarised by the Russian Army. The pictures and art pieces that can be seen in the video are now just absent because they were stolen,” Konieva explains. “Now we watch it with a sense of deep pain.” Many of Volyazlovsky’s artworks remain in Kherson, and there is no information about their fate.

Ukrainian photographer Yevheniy Pavlov, depicting a man flying over a procession for the First of May demonstration, was only printed in the 90s, after the collapse of the USSR, despite the photos being taken in the 70s. Pavlov is among the founders of the artistic group Vremya, which later went on to establish the renowned Kharkiv School of Photography.

Chursin qui vit dans un tabouret, 1991 Oleh Malyovany

In the early days following the collapse of the Soviet Union, property fraud was an everyday occurrence. “People would wake up and not be owners of their apartments anymore,” explains Gulenko, who is also a cultural councillor at the Embassy of Ukraine in France in addition to her role as the director of the cultural centre. In this photograph, Oleh Malyovany, another member of the Vremya group and one of the founding fathers of the Kharkiv School of Photography, addresses this fear of dispossession. “Malyovany portrays someone who is both addicted to their property and exercises the freedom to protect what belongs to them,” Gulenko adds.