It’s almost unbearable. Like in a bad movie, you see what it means when the wrong man gains unchecked power. Simplistic, backward-looking policies recklessly shatter one certainty after another. What unsettles me most personally is the abrupt, almost seamless transition into a mafia-like world order driven by violence. Everything happened so quickly. Sometimes I have to rub my eyes to remind myself that there is still a lot of good in the world. What gave me hope was the memorable speech by Mark Carney, the Prime Minister of Canada, at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

We must not lose courage, not give in to despair, and continue working to set something new, something good against what is bad. Those were his words to us. For us ordinary mortals, there is nothing left but to hope that they will be heard and that we can all cultivate peace, courage, and patience right in our immediate surroundings. I thank you all from the bottom of my heart for making something truly good possible—for making UAHP possible. For standing by the people, by the artists.

Name: 2 | Disappearing Landscapes

Kyiv back in the dark

Unfortunately, the past few weeks have been particularly difficult for Ukrainians. Following the Russian air strikes on January 21, more than one million households in Kyiv are without electricity and, according to >>ZDF Heute, more than 4,000 apartment buildings are without heating. It’s hard to imagine. According to the >>Kyiv Independent, 600,000 of the remaining 3.6 million residents have already left the city. . People are once again sitting in the dark and freezing—as they did at the beginning of 2022—only this time far worse. And no change is yet in sight, as the damage is so extensive that timely repairs are not possible.

And yet, despite frustration and the darkness weighing on their minds, Ukrainians are not giving up. In a recent survey, a majority still support not surrendering and not yielding to Russia. I continue to receive grateful feedback and letters from participants in our UAHP program. As promised last time, today I will tell you about another artist: Marharyta Zhurunova.

Disappeared landscapes

Quelle: REUTERS

Marharyta comes from Vinnytsia, Ukraine. She works with printmaking—especially monotype—drawing, and installation, often precisely at the intersection between graphic art and space. Her work explores the sacred and the non-human-made, but also emotional wounds: how to make them visible, how to endure them, and how to transform them.

Since 2015, she has also been working in co-authorship with Bohdan Lokatyr on environmental, land art, and site-specific projects. She studied at the Ukrainian Academy of Printing (Book and Easel Graphics, Master’s degree), attended the International Summer Academy in Salzburg, among others, and in recent years her work has been shown across Europe: in Kyiv, Vienna (ERSTE Foundation), Spain, Italy, and Iceland. From 2019 to 2021 she received presidential scholarships, and in 2019 she was also awarded a presidential grant—recognition that is not granted by chance.

Name: 5 | Disappearing Landscapes

At the beginning of the full-scale invasion, Marharyta writes, many of her illusions about the “power of art to change the world” were shattered. She thought of Käthe Kollwitz, of Goya, of Guernica, of Otto Dix, and asked herself: How can anyone still want war after seeing such images? And yet she had to witness even educated Russians cheering the war. Her relationship with art was not shaken by this, but only deepened: “It became a tool for survival—a nearly ritualized way of understanding and healing myself.”

When Marharyta applied to UAHP, she was—as she openly says—in an extremely fragile phase. She had just started taking antidepressants, but her therapist made it clear to her that without long-term therapy, the medication would not help. The problem was: she could not afford therapy. Then she found our open call. “It came at exactly the right moment,” she writes, “almost too good to be true.”