Art Amid Displacement: Emerging War-Time Networks of Ukrainian Artists in Germany and Austria

• In Event: Liminal Place-Making: Peripheral Senses and the Folds of Experience

Abstract

This project explores networks of Ukrainian artists displaced since the onset of the full-scale invasion in February 2022. My work draws on personal interviews and fieldwork conducted in the summer of 2024 with Ukrainian artistic collectives in Germany and Austria. Ziegel, a newly formed and horizontally run Graz-based collective illustrates the precarity, difficulties, but also often beautiful solidarity that displaced artists experience as we approach two and a half years after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The Ukrainian Cultural Collective offers residencies and networking opportunities for Ukrainian artists from a renovated brothel in Berlin. Artists unaffiliated with collectives, like Dana Kavelina and Ekaterina Lisovenko, offer perspectives on existing outside of supportive communal spaces. Lasting infrastructures of support and funding have supported Ukrainian refugee artists in Germany and Austria since 2022. Paradoxically, although the war has been totalizing and destructive, these visual artists, filmmakers, and performers have been exposed to new opportunities, funding, and visibility previously unavailable at home or abroad. However, these opportunities are often fleeting. The world of art residencies and funding is precarious, and these conditions of support can change in a short period of time. What is lost in translation when projecting Ukrainian cultural nuances to a Western audience? The Ziegel collective has succeeded in creating solidarity in a new, Western-European context well integrated into local community ventures. Through an analysis of these collectives and artists, we can better understand the dominant themes and conceptual orientations in the refugee art scene. In the words of Ziegel founding member Olia Fedorova: “There’s a fear to come back during the war, but also when the war will come to an end. People really have some fear that they won't fit anymore. They once left, forever left. This is something in common that we have. And there are a lot of different artists, but they work more or less with these thoughts.”

Author

• Elizabeth Crim, U of Colorado at Boulder