Two Ukrainian artists on supporting the war effort through their work, one year on

One year ago this Friday, Russian tanks rolled across the border into Ukraine, escalating a conflict that's been simmering for years with horrific consequences.

But through it all, many Ukrainian artists are still making art, musicians are still playing and dancers still dancing.

Oleksiy Sai and Heinali are two such Ukrainian artists. Sai is a visual artist who lives and works in Kyiv, Ukraine. Oleh Shpudeiko is a music composer and sound artist who records under the name Heinali.

Elamin Abdelmahmoud speaks with the pair about how their lives have changed in the past year, and how they're using their art to support the war effort.

We've included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion, listen and follow the Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud podcast, on your favourite podcast player.

Elamin: Oleh, if I can start with you. What do you remember about the day that Russia invaded?

Oleh: I mean, I didn't think actually there would be an invasion. Like a lot of my friends and colleagues, we thought that there might be something, but not like a full-scale invasion. My girlfriend actually thought that there would be a full-scale invasion, and we argued with her a lot about it. And on February 24th, 2022, we were woken up by the explosions in Kyiv. This is the first that we experienced and heard, and at first I didn't want to believe it, but then actually, we checked the news and realized that this is it, this is the full-scale invasion.

Elamin: Take me through that journey. You didn't think that this was real and was actually going to happen. You were at a place where [you were] even arguing about it with close people to you about whether it was going to happen or not.  Once you realized it was real, what did you do?

Oleh: Well, we agreed with her and, because she was very sure that there would be a full-scale invasion, that we will try to evacuate our parents. I have a mother and she suffers from multiple sclerosis, so this was my top priority: to get her out of Ukraine as fast as possible. But the thing that we don't own cars and we don't have driver's licenses, made it very complicated. But we managed actually to find a driver with a car closer to the evening of February 24th, and we managed to evacuate both my mother and her mother.

Elamin: When you finally get back to Kyiv, what did you find?

Oleh: I didn't actually return to give right away. I spent a month and a half probably in Lviv because it was too dangerous to return back to Kyiv back then. And when I returned to Kyiv, what I found was not really what I expected, because I expected to be very distressed by the situation in Kyiv, and I was distressed, but on the other hand, it was almost like a mystical experience. It's really difficult to put into words...you felt this almost sacred experience of being a part of something that happened to you and happened to other people around you, and that you shared this experience together. It's a deeply traumatic experience, but still, it's something that binds us together and it is something that is really, really difficult to express in words. And the city itself, it felt as if it was alive. So, you wanted to protect it from harm somehow; I don't know, embrace it? Hug it? And I didn't actually understand back then how I can work with this feeling as an artist. It took some time for me to realize that.

Elamin: Oleksiy, I had a chance to see the video installation you made, and it drives home the horrific reality of war in a way that I've never really seen from other artists...

WATCH | A film by Oleksiy Sai (WARNING: This video contains graphic content some viewers may find disturbing):

What we're seeing is genuinely just difficult images to look at from the war, from across Ukraine — whether it is dead bodies, or destroyed buildings, or people in hospitals, or people grieving. It's just a lot of difficult images to look at. But what are we hearing there, Oleksiy?

Oleksiy: The telephone conversations intercepted of Russian soldiers already in Ukraine. And they talk to mothers and wives, and in general, they all encouraging them to steal, to rape. There's a wife, a young wife of the soldier telling him that he should rape some Ukrainian women. I don't want to explain the images, it's images from war, on the front line.

Elamin: What was it like for you, living with these images and sounds as you made this work?

Oleksiy: I had to to make it, to show the total loss of the war. My main task was to bring not information, but to bring physical feeling, something that your body will remember, that your mind, probably — and to show that it's a massive war, and very rude and very inhuman, and it's really horrible. Art can bring this channel of physical understanding, not with the mind but with something stronger. And also, just make it because I can and that's it. It's kind of work, not art.

Elamin: It's interesting that you frame it as work and not art, because to me it is you crafting a specific set of images with a specific set of sounds in order to make me feel something. And as you were describing the sounds that we were hearing, I sort of felt like my whole body turned because that's a visceral image, that's paired with a lot of really difficult images to look at. And in that way, it is art, right? In that way, it is doing the work of what art does, which is change our perspective or change our feelings. And I actually wonder what the toll of living with those images and those sounds for you would have been like, because I imagine that would have been really overwhelming to just splice together even all of those awful things that you were hearing and then put them into this into this work?

Oleksiy: Yeah, physical, physical reaction. There was a physical reaction. I was itching all the time, but it's better than to be under this bonding. So I never paid much attention at all, just work.
 

Elamin: Oleh, I want to shift gears a little bit and talk about how on this Friday, on the anniversary of the invasion, you're releasing a new album. It's called Kyiv Eternal, which you made with recordings of the city before the war. We're talking about sounds of the train station, rain in a tunnel, voices in a shopping mall. Oleh, you've described this record as "a hug for a city that has disappeared." Can you unpack that for me a little bit? What do you mean by that?

Oleh: Well, I actually talked a little bit about this feeling [earlier] — when I returned back to Kyiv from Lviv, that Kyiv felt as if it is a living, breathing being and you wanted to protect it from harm, and you couldn't actually. And back then, I didn't understand how could I work with this feeling as an artist? Because it was a very interesting feeling, but I couldn't really figure out how to how to make meaning, like artistic meaning out of it. And only after some time passed and I achieved this level of distance, I could. Suddenly I realized how I can work with this feeling, and how I can talk about what happened to me and talk about maybe our shared past. But it took time and distance.

WATCH | Heinali: live from a bomb shelter:

Elamin: You're one year into this phase of the war. How do you understand your role as an artist going forward?

Oleh: Right now, I understand my role as someone who who preserves and develops further Ukrainian culture and makes it visible, and audible as well, abroad. It is through art that people from other countries can identify what Ukraine is, and not just identify in terms of political, very simple identification. They can empathize with Ukraine through art. We need to have a strategy of promoting and exporting contemporary Ukrainian culture abroad because we have absolutely fantastic artists and it's a shame that not many people know about us. We have a fantastic electronic music scene that is utterly amazing; people visited our parties during lockdowns, because Ukraine didn't have really very strict lockdown rules and we still had raves and electronic music festivals back then. People all around the world visited them, and for a lot of people, this was the first point of meeting with contemporary Ukrainian culture, and their minds were totally blown; they were really amazed by our artists and what we do.

Right now, I think the best that we can do is to create Ukrainian culture abroad as much as possible, because it is severely underrepresented right now abroad. It is not true that Ukrainian culture is severely underrepresented, but Russian culture is very well represented, unfortunately. I still see Tchaikovsky everywhere. It was a very difficult feeling, a difficult thing to cope with.

You can listen to the full discussion from today's show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.