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Ukraine artists turned refugees bring exhibit Invasion Redux to Canada

Kyiv-based artist Mykola Zhuravel had been planning on visiting Canada from Ukraine since August for his exhibition Invasion Redux. He didn’t realize back then that he would be arriving as a refugee.

Invasion Redux is Zhuravel’s reaction to the annexation of Crimea and beginning of the war in the eastern Donbas region of Ukraine in 2014. The multimedia art exhibition transforms Zhuravel’s experiences of the 2014 Revolution and eventual Russian-backed separatist war in eastern Ukraine into vivid symbolic and surrealistic imagery that encapsulates what it’s like to live in the shadow of a hostile giant.

Exhibit Invasion Redux from Ukraine
Nick Lachance

He first discussed bringing it to Canada with his long-time friend Darrell Brown, the CEO of the CNE Association. They talked about the plans on Zhuravel’s balcony, overlooking Independence Square in Kyiv’s centre, as troops and tanks moved in perfect unison, preparing for the Independence Day parade on August 2021. As Russian propaganda was winding up and troops were being amassed on Ukraine’s borders, Zhuravel’s exhibition felt more relevant than ever.

Several months later, Brown sent Zhuravel a letter of intent to bring Invasion Redux to Canada, and only two days after that, on February 24, Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Within less than a month, Zhuravel, his partner and their 13-year-old son, draped in a Ukrainian flag, arrived in Toronto as refugees, displaced by the same war that inspired his exhibition eight years earlier.

Exhibit Invasion Redux from Ukraine
Nick Lachance

“In the first place, this exhibition shows a portrait of terror and aggression, and it didn’t start today,” says Zhuravel, in an interview with NOW. “The invasion that happened is the result of years of Russian propaganda and Russian influence in many countries.”

With his partner, photographer Daria Tishchenko Zhuravel, the two collaborated on art designed to draw attention to and expose the fallacies in Vladimir Putin’s propaganda both before and since the 2014 invasion.

Exhibit Invasion Redux from Ukraine
Nick Lachance

“We’ve been here now for three weeks,” Tishchenko Zhuravel said, speaking about how coming to Canada has affected their connection to the exhibit. “We are constantly back in Ukraine with our friends in our thoughts and we feel a great impact of responsibility being here. We want to find ways to help Ukrainians back home, using the platform we have now.”

Nick Lachance

Both – unfortunately, as they put it – have been inspired by the expansion of the war to create and update the exhibit. Zhuravel added a drawing of the Russian flagship Moskva after its sinking last week to a 2014 piece entitled Battle For Ukraine. Additionally, Zhuravel will create a new piece inspired by photographer Evgeniy Maloletka’s image of a pregnant woman injured in the shelling of a maternity hospital in Mariupol. She and her baby would die several days later.

“I was really touched by the story of the pregnant woman injured in Mariupol hospital, and I want to incorporate it into a painting,” Zhuravel explained. “It will be called Mariupol Madonna – Prayer For Ukraine. She represents, in my eyes, the image of Ukraine.”

Nick Lachance

Tishchenko Zhuravel invites guests to donate images of their hands when they visit. The hands will form a Canadian flag in an upcoming piece called Legacy Of Help: Giving A Hand. Both artists intend to reveal their finished works before the end of the exhibition.

“I’d like people to come and see [the exhibit], because they need to experience it,” says Zhuravel. “I’d like to have a dialogue, a discussion with them about what they see and how they feel about it.”

First displayed in New York City at the Ukrainian Institute of America in 2016, this is the first time the exhibition has come to Canada.

Invasion Redux runs at the CNE’s Withrow Common Gallery until May 29. Net proceeds from ticket sales will be donated to the UN Refugee Agency (Canada): Ukraine Emergency to support humanitarian aid efforts to help Ukrainians.

@lachancephoto

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