MoMA exhibits Ukrainian artists as a statement of solidarity and tribute to Ukraine

[Donkees]

https://www.moma.org/calendar/galleries/5454

This gallery presents a selection of works made over the course of the last century by artists born in present-day Ukraine. Some spent their formative years in the city of Kyiv, while others ventured farther afield—to Moscow, Berlin, or Paris—joining the most audacious avant-gardes of their time. A number of artists, many of Jewish descent, found safe haven from persecution in New York City. The works on view, executed in various mediums, reflect a wide range of approaches: from abstraction to representation, the mechanical to the handmade, the everyday to the mystical. We have brought them together at this time as a statement of solidarity with, and in tribute to, the people of Ukraine.

The gallery also includes an excerpt from a poem by Serhiy Zhadan, one of Ukraine’s best-known novelists and poets, which appears below in English (translated by John Hennesy and Ostap Kin) and in Ukrainian. A resident of Kharkiv in Eastern Ukraine, since 2014 Zhadan has written about the Russo-Ukrainian war; the poem below is the first entry in his collection A New Orthography (2020). “Serhiy has managed to create a language that transmits in a very understandable way not only contemporary issues,” Ostap Kin has said, “but also neglected, forgotten, or omitted riddles of the past. At the same time it poses necessary questions to work with those things in the future.” Since the full-scale invasion began, Zhadan has remained in Kharkiv, doing humanitarian work and conducting numerous interviews in the city. Earlier this month, the Polish Academy of Sciences nominated him for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
—Alex Halberstadt, Senior Writer, Creative Team https://www.moma.org/magazine/articles/713

Let’s start with what’s most difficult—with singing
and quenching the fires emerging from the night.

Let’s start by whispering the names,
let’s weave together the vocabulary of death.

To stand and talk about the night.
Stand and listen to the voices
of shepherds in the fog
incanting over every single
lost soul.

Collection 1880s–1940s
507
In Solidarity
New on view
Floor 5

MoMA

[Javaman]

1. More art less war. nt