Bringing Subjectivity To The Maidan Issue In Iron Arch by Christina Norman, 2014, Manifesta 10, The European Biennial of Contemporary Art, St. Petersburg, Russia: Palas square
What does escalation mean?
About war via consumer culture
Making art on background of Russian aggression in Moscow
The story of Ukraine’s Strawberry Andreevna, also via #КлубникаАндреевна in facebook
My mother, Lyudmyla Kakhidze, had lived in Zhdanivka, a small town in separatist-occupied territory to the northeast of Donetsk that had seen some of the heaviest fighting during eastern Ukraine’s 2014 war with Russia. She sold fruit at a local market and would call me, based in Kyiv, every day to describe in detail her daily life and share her observations. She did not support Russian activities in Donetsk. I recorded the dialogues with my mother, and later illustrated them as drawings. I gave my mother a nickname — Strawberry Andreevna — to protect her identity. The nickname was based on a name given to my mother by one of the boys in the kindergarten where she used to work as a tutor. After the conflict in eastern Ukraine reached its peak in 2014, Ukraine stopped paying salaries and pensions to those living in occupied territories. To be eligible for her pension, my mother regularly had to cross a checkpoint in the Donetsk region to enter into Ukrainian-controlled territory and prove that she was a Ukrainian resident. The trip in January 2019 was her last. On January 19, she was buried in the village of Muzychi in Ukraine’s Kyiv region. She had died three days earlier at a checkpoint in the eastern Donetsk region — her heart had stopped beating. This is about the memorial I made for her.
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