5 minute read
To Revive Kyiv, Look to its Youth
by Eurovisie
Emilia Juchno
On the 24th of February, 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine in what was referred to by the Russian president Vladimir Putin as merely a “special military operation”. Ever since, the world’s utmost attention has been directed at Kyiv (not Kiev, which is the Russian pronunciation of the city’s name), the Ukrainian capital, the heart of Ukraine, and home to the country’s government and military command headquarters. As Volodymyr Zelenskyy continues to reside in Kyiv’s presidential palace (Mariinskyi Palace), the obvious importance of the city and its protection lies in its crucial role as a central point for strategic planning and international correspondence. However, before the tragic day of the 24th of February, Kyiv was known for much more than the Battle of Kyiv, the brutal Russian offensive and the courageous defence conducted by the Ukrainians. By 2021, this exhilarating city became increasingly referred to as ”the new Berlin”, while being praised for its creative youth and its exciting, rapidly growing club scene. Today, the memories of pre-war Kyiv serve the young generations not only to remember the cultural legacy of their city but also to envisage the city’s future and how they want to rebuild it from the trauma of the war.
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Although Kyiv is at least two thousand years old and a very historical city, it is the success of contemporary Ukrainian artists, musicians, and entrepreneurs that shapes its importance as a European capital today and has drawn me to the conclusion that rebuilding Ukraine after the war will be about much more than just restoring the physical spaces. Like most capitals, Kyiv is the hub for independent thinking and creative movement in the country.
They find ways of expressing themselves through means that were not so widely available to their parents or grandparents, creating visual arts, music, design, and photography. Since 2006, Kyiv has been home to the Pinchuk Art Centre, one of the largest and most influential centres of contemporary art in Eastern Europe. It was responsible for launching the Curatorial Platform, the first institutional educational programme in the field of art curation in Ukraine. In 2022, three young curators from the Pinchuk Art Centre represented Ukraine at the 59th international art exhibition La Biennale di Venezia in Italy. Two of the curators, Maria Lanko and Lizaveta German, are also founders of an online archive of contemporary Ukrainian art (the Open Archive) and a contemporary art gallery located in the heart of Kyiv (the Naked Room). Both projects reflect the young Ukrainians’ passion for their national art and culture, as well as their desire to reach wider audiences, seeing as the art market in Ukraine is still quite young.
Apart from the exhibition of formal and more traditional art, young people have looked for inspiration and new audiences for their art in the increasingly popular club culture. The combination of Kyiv’s thriving techno culture and underground nightlife together with its affordability and its industrious, dynamic young generation, is precisely what draws people to compare it to Berlin. In 2019, a group of young people from Kyiv opened a mysterious music club in the city, with a name that consists merely of a mathematical symbol which means ”does not exist”. Every season, this secretive club publishes their own magazine available exclusively inside the club, whose location remains, of course, a mystery. Their first edition was devoted entirely to discussing Ukrainian identity and promoting local art - they invited eighteen Ukrainian artists to publish their work in the pages of the magazine. Among them was Polina Karpova, a thirty-year-old photographer and costume designer, whose biggest inspiration is the post-soviet aesthetic, drawn from the memories of her very own childhood and teenage years. Polina’s work is said to represent the New Sincerity movement, which has been growing increasingly popular around the world, including in Ukraine. Ukrainian New Sincerity is all about post-modernist irony and cynicism, represented through kitsch and parodic imagery and a general aesthetic that draws from things that are not ’beautiful’ in a classic sense of the word - such as the brutalist soviet blocks visible in many of Polina’s photographs.
It is people like Maria, Lizaveta and Polina, who shape Kyiv’s contemporary cultural scene. Although the war may have temporarily obstructed them from working and sharing their creations, they represent an entire generation of young Ukrainians who are both ingenious and inquisitive, actively looking for ways to express that ingenuity. The images of a vibrant, youthful, flourishing city, home to numerous art-related initiatives, are the ones that must prevail in our memory of Kyiv and serve as a reminder that the spirit of this struggling Ukrainian city will be just as important to preserve as its roads and buildings.
