I want to forgive it! Or how to immortalize history in murals and monuments and not harm people

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Heroization of the events and people of the war and their perpetuation in the spaces of cities became one of the most controversial topics of the autumn. Fierce discussions actually always erupt due to the appearance of murals or graffiti in places of mass murders of Ukrainians by the Russians, on destroyed houses or due to the appearance of thematic paintings on the walls in crowded places.

The latest discussion broke out around a mural on a historic building in the center of Kyiv. After that, indifferent Kyivans even created a petition to the capital authorities with the demand to ban painting on the walls.

Murals have actually become the most common practice of commemorating this war. Because it takes longer and procedurally more difficult to build monuments or rename streets with the names of heroes.

The fiercest disputes revolve around three issues:

• can art offer a universally acceptable formula for encoding heroism or a tragic event – so that the work is understandable and does not cause retraumatization?
• does the artist have the right to express himself in the public space of the city?
• How should the city authorities preserve the memory of this war in the public spaces of the cities?

Editor of UP.Kultura Tetyana Pushnova is looking for answers to these questions together with a member of the Kyiv City Council Evgenia Kulebathe mayor of Melitopol Ivan Fedorov and art manager Katya Taylor. Evgenia was one of the activists of the Revolution of Dignity, thanks to which the first commemorative social space and wall painting appeared in Kyiv – the Square of the Heavenly Hundred and the image of Serhiy Nigoyan in it. Before the full-scale invasion, Ivan ensured a transparent procedure in his city for erecting monuments to tragic events – the Holocaust and the Holodomor – and involved recognized Ukrainian artists in erecting them. And Katya already during the invasion placed murals in support of Ukraine in the cities of Europe and Africa.

A mural with a patriotic motif and the name of vodka, an advertisement for pet products on a glamorized image of the famous Irpin zoo volunteer, kitsch on the walls of a historical building – over the past year, Kyiv has been filled with murals that distort reality and exploit human tragedies, says Evgenia Kuleba.

A mural in the capital Podil. Instead of dogs with disabilities, which were evacuated from under shelling in Irpen by zoo volunteer Anastasia Tykha, thoroughbred and well-groomed animals are depicted. Photo: Shevchenkiv RDA / Facebook

“There is a complete mess with this in Kyiv”, – the deputy of the Kyiv City Council continues her story. “Murals are “gifted” to the city, they are used to express themselves in a patriotic theme. They are placed without discussion with the residents, without understanding, and what are our memory policies? How will people with PTSD react to these images? How will these murals be perceived in 10 years? What is their artistic value after all?”

With the latest case, Kyivites lost their temper – when the image of a romantic couple against the background of a pelican began to be painted on the building of 1903 on Sichovy Streltsiv Street, residents called the police and stopped the work. And concerned activists created a petition with a demand to the local authorities “to stop the creation of new murals until the approval of a transparent mechanism for the involvement of the community and the expert environment to agree on their sketches.”

A mural on Sichovy Streltsy Street in Kyiv

The first mural wave that caused an aesthetic split in Kyiv was the appearance of the Geo Leros project, recalls the curator of modern art and art manager Katya Taylor. Leros’s idea was to saturate the city with visual post-revolutionary plots:

“Among the projects, there were both good ones and not so good ones. But their massiveness at that time changed the face of Kyiv literally in one year, and it is not clear whether the city really needed this change. At that time, Oleg Sosnov was also engaged in projects in the public space, and thanks to him, Kyiv appeared several good murals, including the work of Interesting Tales on Streletskaya.

That is, there was a certain curation, selection, names, sketches.”

Mural on Streletsky Street. Photo: Volodymyr Manzhos

According to Katya, nowadays murals are not created by curators, but by everyone who wants to solve their problem on the walls of the city and has the means to do so.

“This seems dangerous to me. In fact, today murals serve as a kind of forum for debate, expression of opinions, commemoration, advertising space, disguised as social initiatives. These are definitely all important things (except for the last one) for which you need to allocate time and space. The question is, should this be the public space of the city?”

Yevgenia Kuleba believes that the situation could be solved by competitions of public art projects – murals, monuments and sculptures. This practice is widespread in European cities, says the deputy. City authorities submit for discussion the planes they want to dedicate to wall paintings, and the expert commission chooses the most relevant artistic projects. In many cases, the communities of the districts themselves have the last word – people approve works by voting.

Transparent contests with the involvement of a competent expert commission really help both the city authorities and the community to understand each other, and to create valuable works in the public space. The mayor of Melitopol is convinced of this Ivan Fedorov. However, in Melitopol after the Euromaidan, everything did not start with murals or monuments:

“When, after the Revolution of Dignity, our team was elected in the elections, we realized that for a long time the city had actually remained a hostage of the corrupt, anti-Ukrainian government. And we decided that it should be filled with Ukraine, Ukrainian symbols. Therefore, to begin with, we hung a lot of – many Ukrainian flags”.

Fedorov calls it the return of Ukrainian spirituality to the people of Melitopol. One of the first memorial signs that the new city government established through an open creative competition was a memorial sign to the victims of the Holocaust. The expert commission identified the project of the famous Ukrainian sculptor, co-curator of the Kaniv Sculpture Symposium Oleksandr Dyachenko as the winner.

Memorial sign to the victims of the Holocaust, Melitopol. Photo: jew-observer.com

The next ambitious project of the Melitopol authorities was the construction of a monument to the victims of the Holodomor – its installation was initiated by the residents of the community. I call it “ambitious” because the goal of the memorial – reform the urban space, and the monument itself will prompt Melitopol citizens to think.

According to Fedorov, the success of the project was ensured by the partnership of the city’s Fund for Preservation of Historical and Cultural Heritage and the Past/Future/Art memory culture platform. The expert commission included curator Yelyzaveta Herman, sculptor Nazar Bilyk, cultural manager Kateryna Semenyuk, and founders of the architectural bureau “Form” Iryna Miroshnikova and Oleksiy Petrov.

The competition was closed – after preparatory studies, the expert commission invited five Ukrainian artists to participate in the competition, who visited Melitopol, talked with local local historians and, together with the expert council, proposed a place for the memorial. Next, the participants of the competition proposed their solutions for the monument specifically for the selected location.

Liya and Andriy Dostlevy, Pavlo Kovach, Vitaly Kohan, the duo of Yarema Malashchuk and Roman Himey, Daniil Shumikhin took part in the competition.

Shortly before the full-scale invasion, the commission completed its work and announced the results of the competition.

Ivan Fedorov says that when Melitopol is liberated from the Russian occupiers, he will be able to continue the construction of the Holodomor memorial and start work on new – to perpetuate the events of this war.

“You see, reconstruction cannot be planned without planning monuments, murals, new spaces of memory. We need to think about how our cities will remember their heroes who made this reconstruction possible. How they will tell the stories of those who fought for these cities under occupation”, – convinces the leader of Melitopol.

The winning project of the competition in Melitopol: Daniil Shumikhin, working title “Column”. Photo: pastfutureart.org

Bucha, which became a symbol of the atrocities of the Russian occupiers, was released more than a year and a half ago. During this time, fewer and fewer places in the city remind of the tragic events of the occupation, instead there is already a small memorial with the names of the victims, and patriotic murals compete with the graffiti of Banksy and other street artists.

Buchan rulers invite artists from abroad to create murals. But this does not solve the problem, Katya Taylor believes. She commented on one of Buchi’s last murals by American artists for UP.Zhyttya.

“I miss a dialogue with a Ukrainian artist here, who would say: everything is cool, but today a Ukrainian woman is, first of all, a woman in a helmet, not in a wreath, and she is not necessarily “on the lips” (sorry, it hurt) That is, foreign artists depicted their idea of ​​Ukrainian women. Well done. It would be appropriate somewhere in the States. And here it looks like a misunderstanding of the context, current challenges and the role of women in society.”, – explains the curator.

Mural by American artists BANDIT, John Ashbaugh and Tristan George in Butch

Shortly after its creation, this mural in Bucha was covered with paint by a 26-year-old man. He told the police that he did not like the image.

Instead, another Buchan work, which was left on the shot window of the house by American artists, is intact. Katya Taylor does not call this image a mural. He says that this is rather an intervention that may not be authorized by the city authorities.

Graffiti with a clock on a shot window

“If artists work in abandoned industrial areas, on the contrary, it complements and creates a certain character of the place. Interventions and tags can and should be. And usually graffiti artists respect the city. They are in dialogue with it,” – explains the art manager, adding that not all public art should be regulated. After all, artists must be given space for creative freedom.

Sculptures, monuments, graffiti and murals are the visual language of the city, says Katya: “We, people, have a need to create images, express our opinion through drawing, text, leave an imprint of time in space.”

The Porto mural in Liverpool, created as part of the Eurofestival for the Eurovision Song Contest 2023

Katya believes that contests should be held if a work of art is created with budget funds. At the same time, it is necessary to involve the community of the city or district in its discussion. But this practice does not always work:

“Competitions are also important if it is a project of public interest – a monument honoring heroes. If it is a private initiative, a curator may be enough.”

Together with the team of their agency Porto, they created murals in many European cities. “Our experience shows that expertise is important in European cities. In Brussels, Berlin, Vienna, we approved projects not just with the municipality, but above all with the cultural department”, – says the art manager.

Mural Porto in Africa

Katya names another important aspect of creating a public art project: “There is a separate program of public art in Brussels, which gives priority to women artists. Because they are usually less represented in the public space of cities. Therefore, we also had a female collaboration. And this is point number two – collaboration!”

According to Taylor, collaboration with local artists is important in a new city or country – they help immerse yourself in the context:

“As insiders, they first know how art works in their city, what are the current trends, social challenges. In our project, The Wall, it has always been a collaboration between a Ukrainian and a foreign artist.”

Post Scriptum

In our conversation with the mayor of Melitopol, I asked him if he liked the project of the Holodomor monument that won the competition. To which Ivan Fedorov replied:

“It is not at all a question whether I like or dislike a work of art – I do not have the competence to evaluate it. My task as mayor is to create such conditions that recognized art professionals are involved in the competition and in the creation – so that later in their choice no one doubted.

And artists have such a vision, when they seem to look into the future. And we may not like their work today, but it will be important and true many generations after us.”

Read also: Undeclared war on mosaics: how Ukrainians are losing their heritage deep in the rear

Square of the Heavenly Hundred and the mural with the image of Serhii Nigoyan by the Portuguese graffiti artist Alejandra Fartu (Vhils)

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