EGN NEWS DESK
Hiding for days within the basement of a kindergarten in Bucha, the Kyiv suburb that grew to become synonymous with Russian struggle crimes, Oksana Semenik had time to suppose.
Outside, Russian troops had been rampaging by way of the city, killing civilians who ventured into the streets. Knowing she won’t make it out, Ms. Semenik, an artwork historian, mulled over the Ukrainian artworks she had lengthy needed to write down about — and which had been now in peril of disappearing.
That time spent holed up in Bucha was through the early days of Russia’s full-scale invasion, however even then, two years in the past, she had already seen reviews of destroyed museums. Precious people work by her favourite artist, Maria Primachenko, had gone up in flames. Moscow, she realized, was waging a struggle on Ukrainian tradition.
“They’re destroying artworks. They’re destroying museums. They’re destroying structure,” Ms. Semenik recalled considering within the basement. She vowed that if she escaped from Bucha, she wouldn’t permit Ukrainian artwork to fall into oblivion. “It was like: ‘There’s a struggle. You can die any minute. You shouldn’t postpone all this analysis any longer.’”
Ever since, Ms. Semenik, 26, has been working to satisfy that vow.
After fleeing Bucha on foot, she began “Ukrainian Art History,” an English-language account on the social platform X, the place for the previous 21 months she has been posting each day in regards to the lives and works of long-overlooked Ukrainian artists. Her posts, which have typically exceeded 100,000 views, have turn out to be a go-to useful resource for studying about Ukrainian artwork.
But maybe an much more vital achievement has been her work to press world-class museums to rethink their classifications.
Using her on-line recognition to open doorways, Ms. Semenik has lobbied them to reclassify artwork lengthy thought of Russian — as a result of it dates from the Russian Empire or the Soviet Union — as Ukrainian.
She calls her effort “decolonizing Ukrainian artwork.”
Thanks to her and different activists, establishments such because the Metropolitan Museum of Art have relabeled many artworks and artists, revising a long time of observe that critics say conflated Ukraine’s tradition with that of its former Russian ruler.
As Russia seeks to erase Ukrainian id, with artwork a main goal, Ms. Semenik’s work has been essential to elevating consciousness of the nation’s cultural heritage at a vital time, art-world figures say, serving to refute the Kremlin’s declare that Ukrainian nationhood is a fiction.
“Russia says: ‘Hey, present us your tradition. You don’t have any. Ukraine is just not a nation,” Ms. Semenik mentioned in a latest interview. “That’s what I’m combating in opposition to.”
A reserved lady with red-dyed hair, Ms. Semenik nonetheless remembers the day she first learn in regards to the Ukrainian roots of Kazimir Malevich, the Kyiv-born painter and an essential pioneer of summary artwork. Malevich has lengthy been described as Russian, however he recognized himself as Ukrainian in his diaries.
“Really, is that true?” she recalled interested by her discovery, round 2016, which sparked her curiosity in Ukrainian artwork.
Ms. Semenik went on to work as a tradition journalist for a number of years earlier than enrolling in a grasp’s diploma program in artwork at Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv in 2021. She accomplished her grasp’s thesis, on the illustration of the Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe in Ukrainian artwork, final 12 months.
When she launched her X account, in June of 2022, she made some extent of highlighting Ukrainian artists she noticed as wrongly recognized as Russian. Those included the avant-garde artist Oleksandra Ekster, the Nineteenth-century painter Illia Repin and, in fact, Malevich.
Many shared a typical story: They had been born, lived or labored in Ukraine; they usually had been oppressed, exiled or killed by Russia. Yet the world had remembered them as Russians, due to Moscow’s longstanding efforts to forged Ukrainian tradition as Russian patrimony.
Ms. Semenik desires to debunk these myths by “writing about Ukrainian artists which were ‘stolen’ by Russians,” she wrote shortly after launching her account.
Oleksandra Kovalchuk, the deputy director on the Odesa Fine Arts Museum, mentioned Ms. Semenik’s efforts had been “actually essential to point out that Ukraine has a protracted historical past” and to counter Moscow’s narrative that Ukraine had all the time been a part of Russia. “Art is a sworn statement of that.”
But Ms. Semenik knew that this narrative had been unfold for a very long time and was deeply embedded in artwork establishments. So when she was supplied a fellowship within the fall of 2022 at Rutgers University, she determined to spend a part of it finding out the collections of Western museums and monitoring down what she believed had been errors of their labeling of Ukrainian artwork.
She began on the Zimmerli Art Museum, which is a part of Rutgers University and has the world’s largest assortment of Soviet nonconformist artwork, works created outdoors the official state system and its most popular fashion of Socialist Realism. She spent weeks researching the artists’ birthplaces and workplaces.
“Oksana got here in and noticed works that had been labeled Russian and she or he was like, ‘They’re Ukrainian!’” recalled Maura Reilly, the Zimmerli’s director. “So we had been like, ‘Yes, please repair it for us!’ She did unbelievable work.”
Ms. Semenik then turned her sights to different museums. What she discovered shocked her.
The Museum of Modern Art. The Met. The Jewish Museum. Each had scores of mislabeled Ukrainian artworks, in response to reviews she compiled.
Ms. Semenik despatched the museums emails, urging them to right the labels, with spreadsheets hooked up that detailed the details about the artists she mentioned had been wrongly described. The museum’s responses had been typically noncommittal, exasperating her.
In an electronic mail to the Brooklyn Museum, she identified {that a} panorama portray by Repin set in what’s now Ukraine was referred to as “Winter Scene, Russia.”
“It’s like having a portray set in India throughout British colonial rule and naming it ‘British panorama,’” she mentioned, the anger in her voice clear.
Several museums, together with the Brooklyn Museum, mentioned in written feedback that they had been reviewing their labels, however that the duty was difficult by the overlapping identities of some artists. Malevich, as an illustration, was born in Ukraine to Polish dad and mom and lived in Russia for a few years.
Ms. Semenik mentioned she was “not attempting to erase all different identities and simply name these artists Ukrainian,” however {that a} Russian-only label amounted to being complicit in Russia’s appropriation of Ukrainian tradition.
Eventually, Ms. Semenik determined to publicly name out the museums on social media. Her posts had been broadly shared on-line, in a sort of name-and-shame operation. Other Ukrainian activists additionally badgered Western museums to evaluation their collections. It wasn’t lengthy earlier than Ms. Semenik seen adjustments within the museums’ labels.
“I’ve fantastic information,” she wrote on X early final 12 months, whereas taking shelter in Kyiv throughout a Russian air assault: The Met had acknowledged Repin as Ukrainian.
The Brooklyn Museum dropped the label figuring out him as Russian, as an alternative itemizing his birthplace as present-day Ukraine. Other establishments, such because the National Gallery in London and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, have additionally made adjustments.
“Without Oksana’s efforts, undoubtedly, it might have taken longer,” mentioned Ms. Kovalchuk, who participated in pushing the Met to vary their labels.
Ms. Semenik mentioned she typically begins her artwork discussions with the query, “Why don’t you already know Ukrainian artists?”
“Maybe I gained’t must ask that query at some point,” she mentioned.
