Curated by Monika Fabijanska Women in War opens at the North Dakota Museum of Art on January 16, 2025. This powerful exhibition showcases the work of leading contemporary women artists from Ukraine, including Yevgenia Belorusets, Oksana Chepelyk, Olia Fedorova, Alena Grom, Zhanna Kadyrova, Alevtina Kakhidze, Dana Kavelina, Lesia Khomenko, Vlada Ralko, Anna Scherbyna, Kateryna Yermolaeva, and Alla Horska (1929-1970). Spanning media from painting to video, it explores the gendered perspectives of war, questioning victimhood and female agency in conflict. With works reflecting the ongoing war in Ukraine since 2014, this exhibition offers a poignant and urgent platform for women to shape the narrative of history and war.
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War is central to history. History has been written (and painted) by men. This exhibition provides a platform for women narrators of history and also examines gendered perspectives of war. Many artists in this exhibition struggle with the notion of victimhood and pose the question, “In what way do women have agency during war?”Women at War features works by leading contemporary women artists working in Ukraine, and provides context for the current war, as represented in art across media. Several works in the exhibition were made immediately following February 24, 2022, when Russia began the full-scale invasion of Ukraine; others date from the eleven years of war following the annexation of Crimea and the creation of separatist Donetsk and Luhansk “People’s Republics” in Donbas in 2014.
Public Programs:
Thursday, January 16, 4:30 PM
Opening reception
Friday, January 24, 12 PM & Sunday January 26, 2 PM
Gallery tours led by the NDMA Curator, Anna Sigridur Arnar
Thursday, February 27, 4 PM
Curator’s Talk by Monika Fabijanska at the NDMA. The event will be livestreamed.
Friday, February 28, 9 AM
The University Council of Women+ breakfast to kick off Women’s History Month with Monika Fabijanska as a speaker at the Memorial Union.
Friday, February 28, 6-8 PM
Screening of films by Women at War artists at the Empire Arts Center:
– North American Premiere: Alevtina Kakhidze, All Good, 2024, 19:57 min
– Dana Kavelina, Mark Tulip Who Spoke with Flowers, 2018, 15:19 min
– Dana Kavelina, Monuments, 2022, 34:35 min
Q&A with artists via Zoom. Reception at the Empire Arts Center will follow.
The Washington Post’s and Frieze’s10 best art exhibitions in 2022
“…featuring 12 of the country’s leading contemporary women artists, who offer insight into Eastern European feminisms and, most importantly, a gendered perspective on war, which, though it affects all, is typically told from a male point point of view.”
– Lori Waxman, The Chicago Tribune
“If war has historically been waged and documented artistically by men, perhaps exhibitions like this reflect – or even subtly effect – a shift in universal historical consciousness.”
– Martha Schwendener, The New York Times
“The refusal of victimhood is the most pervasive idea uniting these works, even in images that deal directly with rape as a tool of war. This requires resistance not just to contemporary ideas and labels, but to narrative ideas and poetic images as old as civilization: that women are the vessels of wartime trauma and their bodies a canvas on which men write history with the lacerating quill of violence.”
– Philip Kennicott, The Washington Post
“Like so many artists after the 2014 Maidan Revolution [Dana Kavelina] found beneath the polluted Donbas soil the aquifers of a new Ukrainian art, grown only more urgent since the full-scale invasion. When Kavelina’s titular turtledove turns into a flaming fighter jet, when her whispered poetry gives way to air raid sirens, you remember whose signals need to get through.”
– Jason Farago, The New York Times
The exhibition was originally presented by Fridman Gallery, New York in collaboration with Voloshyn Gallery, Kyiv/Miami, at Fridman Gallery in the summer of 2022, and has been traveling since then.
