‘You'll never save the world with art, but it will help you survive': artist calls on Ukraine to promote its culture
Instead, the artist, one of Ukraine's most senior and respected cultural figures, is living in Kharkiv, his hometown.
Situated about 18 miles from the Russian border, Ukraine's second city suffers brutal missile attacks night after night – only to spring to life in the daytime, when parks, cafes and restaurants fill up with those brave or stubborn enough to cling on to life here.
Kharkiv is a city where cultural activity takes place on ground floors or – even better – underground, in basement bars, theatres and bookshops.
Makov and his wife are among those who take their chances. The nearest Metro station, which would offer protection from raids, is 500m away, 'and most of the attacks on Kharkiv are so fast that as soon as you hear the sound of the alarm the bombs have already fallen'.
And so, they put in ear plugs and lay a bet with death that they will survive the night.
He and his family escaped Kharkiv and lived for a time in Italy at the beginning of the war in 2022. But, like many Ukrainians, he found living away from home more stressful than being present, despite the bombs.
'I could have stayed in Italy but realised I was losing my senses. After six months you lose the ability to understand what you are doing there. When we came back I immediately I thought: 'OK, I'm in my place.''
Makov has recently renovated a new studio in the city. It is on the ground floor: less vulnerable to air attack than his old, fourth-floor place. Its windows are small for an artist's studio – but practical for a city where glass gets blown out of buildings every day.
On an easel is a large, bold new drawing in vivid shades of emerald and orange – a departure for Makov who, for years, has worked mostly in highly intricate monochrome prints and graphite pencil.
It is a drawing of a somewhat battered urban weed that grows in the cracks in the pavement. 'It's exactly how I feel myself now: a bit ruined but still alive,' Makov said.
The weed is a kind of plantain, different species of which grow across the world. In Ukraine, this humble plant is often applied to bruises or scrapes as a folk remedy. Its name, podorozhnyk, literally translates as 'by the road' – a state of being for the many Ukrainians who are dealing with being displaced, or the threat of being made homeless by a shifting frontline or falling bombs.
'We all have this feeling that we are living from suitcases,' Makov said. His rucksack always stands by the door, packed with his vital documents and ready for a swift departure.
The image of this plant, and its metaphorical power, was a way of tackling the overwhelming subject of war indirectly, he said.
'The language of war is so strong, so powerful. It is so enormous that none of us can compete with its power,' he said. 'But at the same time, art exists. It has always existed. They were using it in caves to explain the world, to find a connection with the world. You'll never save the world with it – but it will help you survive your life.'
When the invasion began on 24 February 2022, Makov, like other artists in the city, took refuge in Kharkiv's contemporary art gallery, the Yermilov Centre, which is in the concrete basement of a university building.
He was due to represent his country at the Venice Biennale – the art world's most prestigious regular international gathering, which opened in April of that year. But sheltering from the bombings, he abandoned all thoughts of making it to Italy – until one of the project's curators called him and told him she had part of his artwork in her car, she was already in Vienna, and she was determined to show something for her country, come what may.
The next morning Makov and his family made their escape, racing to their car as a cruise missile hit the nearby headquarters of the SBU security service. One of his tyres got a puncture owing to the broken glass strewing the roads. He had to make an emergency return dash to his mother's flat, because she had forgotten her false teeth. But the family and their pets made it out. And he did end up representing Ukraine at the Venice Biennale.
But it was no thanks to the Ukrainian government, he said.
'I got two telephone calls from the ministry of culture of Italy, asking whether we needed some help. And no phone call from from the ministry of culture of Ukraine.
'It was like we didn't exist,' he said. 'OK, there was a war. But if you're the ministry of culture, your war is there, in the world of culture.' The Ukrainian gallery with whom he works, The Naked Room, is still out of pocket because of the event 'because we got no support from the state' beyond the hiring of the space in which the exhibition was held.
Compared with Russia, which projects itself internationally via its literature, music, ballet and opera, Ukraine was way behind on promoting itself through culture, he said.
There is no museum of contemporary art in the country. 'We have a unique situation, now,' he said. 'For the first time in the history of Ukraine, three generations of artists are alive, not killed, and the art they produced has not been destroyed.' It was evidence of a kind of 'provincialism', he said, 'a kind of disrespect to yourself', not to have built such an institution in an independent Ukraine.
'Why am I interested in Great Britain? Not because it won this war or lost this war, it is because Turner is British and I love Turner. Why do I love Ireland? Because James Joyce is one of my favourite writers.'
'In Ukraine we don't have any kind of vision of how to represent Ukraine as a cultural society. We have writers, we have poets, we have we have all these things that we can export, but nobody's doing that. All our cultural exporting is based on volunteer movements.'
Ukrainian society had been changed for ever by the war, he said Huge population shifts had been caused by internal displacement and by trauma, but also through the great divides opening up between individuals, based on their very different experiences during the war: soldiers living through a hellish trench warfare on the front, compared with those far behind the lines or those based abroad.
Even so, he said, 'We all have one general idea: we need the end of the war. Better, a victory, but at least some kind of stable peace.' But like many others in Ukraine, he finds it hard to envision, under the current circumstances, how that might be achieved. 'Normally a stable peace comes if your enemy is destroyed. And I can't imagine that we can destroy Russia, somehow. Russia has a lot of fat under the skin.'
'This drama has been going on now for over three years. It will soon have been going on for as long as the second world war. And I don't think that people understand Russians will never stop unless they are stopped. If they're not stopped, they will never stop.'
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Guardian
5 hours ago
- The Guardian
‘A train nearly took my head off': how Lady Pink shook up the macho men of New York's graffiti scene
Lady Pink was five when she killed her first snake – with her bare feet. 'That shows what a precocious and fearless kid I was,' says the 61-year-old. Even over the phone from upstate New York, the venerated graffiti artist is a force to be reckoned with, talking at a breakneck tempo punctuated by bursts of raucous laughter. There's a sense that this energy might quickly combust too – she admits she 'totally lost it' while preparing for her current solo show, Miss Subway NYC, at D'Stassi Art in London. The exhibition sees her vividly recreate a New York City subway station. There are paintings in eye-popping colours depicting trains, train yards and playful portraits of the characters you typically see there: a busker in a cat costume, an elderly lady with a shopping cart and a chihuahua. With the help of her husband, fellow graffiti artist Smith, she has even meticulously reproduced layers of tags on the walls from her halcyon days, when she would risk arrest – and sometimes her life – to spray across the city at night. On the show's opening night, more than 1,000 people showed up to pay their respects to the grande dame of graf. Lady Pink was born Sandra Fabara in Ambato, Ecuador, in 1964. Her story begins on her grandparents' sugarcane plantation in the Amazon rainforest – a vast, wild terrain that, like the snake who met its fate at her feet, didn't intimidate her. Her mother had returned after leaving Pink's father, an agricultural engineer who was a 'womaniser, gambler, cheater … '. As soon as she had enough money, when Pink was seven, they left Ecuador for New York City. 'When we came here, we had no papers, we didn't speak the language.' Pink was a self-assured, determined and talented kid who quickly learned how to channel her pain and grief into creativity. She first got into graffiti at 15, after her boyfriend was arrested for tagging and sent to live with relatives in Puerto Rico. 'I cried for a whole month, then I started tagging his name everywhere.' A painting in her London show of the artist as a teen kissing a handsome boy pays tribute to this defining moment in her personal history. When she started high school in Queens, she met 'kids who knew how to get into yards and tunnels. The more they said, 'You can't, you're a girl,' the more I had to prove them wrong. I was stubborn as a mule. I was crazy.' As one of the only women accepted by the notoriously macho graffiti scene in New York in the late 1970s, she quickly gained a reputation for tagging subway trains. 'We are like a guild, a clannish, tribal group who go out at night and watch each other's backs.' She later earned her official moniker 'Pink' from a fellow member of TC5 crew, Seen. 'I was the only female in the city painting, and I needed a female name so everyone would know our crew tolerated a female,' she explains. 'I knew I was the token female and that got my foot in the door – but to keep up with the big bad boys, I had to back it up with real talent too. There was sexism of course, but I'm a little bit of a badass. I don't appreciate being walked over and I stand up strongly for myself. Even if I'm petite, I'm loud. Don't judge me by my size, judge me by how big and fast I paint!' She added the 'Lady' title – at first inspired by the European nobility in the historical romance novels she was reading. 'But I don't write Lady – I'm terrible at the letter Y.' Later she used the Lady title to avoid confusion with the pop singer of the same name – who approached the artist to design her first album cover. 'I said, 'Hell no!' Are you kidding me? But she's a fan, I'm not going to say anything bad about her, she's fine, she sings fine.' As a young woman out at night in New York's most insalubrious neighbourhoods in 1979, Pink was especially vulnerable. 'I would dress like a boy and pretend to be a boy. The teens I ran with weren't much bigger than me and I knew they weren't there to protect me if shit went down. You're in the worst neighbourhoods of New York City relying on the kindness of strangers to save your life – you've got to be prepared. What happens in the dark alleys of cities, you don't want to know. You shake a spray can and hope they let you live.' 'Bombing' subway trains is one of the most perilous activities of graffiti – 'loads of kids have died doing it, getting run over by the trains or electrocuted. It still happens. It's live electricity: if you touch the rail you will die.' How did she survive? 'You don't stumble in like you're drunk, it's like a military manoeuvre. You know the train schedules, where to walk, where to hide. You have all of that figured out ahead of time. You need to be sure where you're going when you're running like panicked rats in the dark maze.' Sign up to Art Weekly Your weekly art world round-up, sketching out all the biggest stories, scandals and exhibitions after newsletter promotion Still, there were more than a few close calls over the years. She recalls she once sliced her finger open and 'it was bleeding badly, it was a terrible cut and I probably should have had it stitched, but I just stuck it in my pocket and it quietly bled in there. I didn't want people to say: 'Oh you're a girl you're hurt and crying, you're going to slow us down,' – you've got to be a good soldier.' Another time, there was a near miss with an unforeseen moving train. 'I had gone to pee and I thought I could just walk it,' she laughs. 'Then there was a train coming and it was doing a weird curve, slanting into the wall. At the last minute I ducked, but if I had stayed standing the train would've taken my head off. After that, I just ran at top speed. I can't believe I survived it.' The 1980s were a whirlwind. She rose to fame in 1983 after featuring in Wild Style, the cult film that launched American hip-hop culture globally. Her spray-painted canvases, horror vacui compositions with bold, attention-grabbing colours of scenes inspired by the street, began to be accepted in conventional, legal art spaces, and in 1984 she was included in MoMA PS1's The New Portrait alongside Alice Neel, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. 'No one was aware it was going to launch anything, we were just in it for the moment and the money. People told us the art market was fickle and eventually we'd have to get jobs.' Once she invited Haring to come to paint a train with her. 'Just me and him, no machismo – but dude was not down, he didn't want to cross the line of breaking laws. What he did was chalk on boards. He was a white dude; he wasn't incurring any kind of arrests. They weren't graffiti artists, but they were the original street artists. Graffiti artists work with spray, with fonts – and we hit stuff with wheels.' Pink also received an invitation from Jenny Holzer, who was wheatpasting her Truisms posters in Manhattan. 'We were like the only women going out at night doing things. She was a tall lady, like two metres, she would wear a hoodie and a big coat so she could pass off as a man going around at night alone. I am very small and I couldn't pass off like that, so I had to run with a crew. She reached out to me and suggested we collaborate.' Holzer had done up an entire building in the Lower East Side. 'It was wild out there at that time, there were a lot of people doing drugs, there was a lot of crime. But she made this beautiful, safe building, and I loved going there and working with her.' Holzer would prep three-metre-square canvases for Lady Pink to spray paint her images on, and Holzer paired them with text. The works were later shown at MoMA and Tate Modern. In 1983, 19-year-old Pink was photographed by Lisa Kahane wearing a vest emblazoned with Holzer's famous words: 'Abuse of power comes as no surprise' – in 2017 the photo went viral as an emblem of the #MeToo movement. Though artwork sales and interest did wane in the late 1980s, Pink pivoted. She set up a mural company with her husband, doing public commissions and working in communities. While many of her peers 'couldn't handle the business, they couldn't leave the ghetto behind, they couldn't show up on time or answer a phone call', she says she was able to 'adapt to polite society. Artists don't know how to hustle, and you've gotta hustle, hustle, hustle. Some don't have the cojones. But good grief, you've got to go knocking on doors!' She stopped illegally painting subway trains decades ago – 'now I save my crazy for the galleries' – but the spirit of the subway lives on in the London show. And she says she's still paying the price for her years of youthful rebellion. Twelve years ago, she and her husband moved upstate after 'one too many' police raids on their home in NYC. 'They took my stuff – including my husband – and messed with us. We had to spend money on an expensive attorney. They've told me to stick to the indoor stuff and not paint big old murals because they inspire people. I said yeah – community people, poets, artists, I should hope I inspire people!' One thing is for sure: she doesn't have any regrets. 'Street art is the biggest art movement, we are in every corner of the world. By whatever means possible, we are taking over this world, it's our whole plan! I think it's cool, man – you've got to take control of your environment. You don't need an MA to be an artist, you just need a little paint plus a little courage. Just do it!' Lady Pink: Miss Subway NYC is at D'Stassi Art, London, until late September.
The Guardian
7 hours ago
- The Guardian
‘I'm a badass': how Lady Pink took on the macho men of New York's graffiti scene
Lady Pink was five when she killed her first snake – with her bare feet. 'That shows what a precocious and fearless kid I was,' says the 61-year-old. Even over the phone from upstate New York, the venerated graffiti artist is a force to be reckoned with, talking at a breakneck tempo punctuated by bursts of raucous laughter. There's a sense that this energy might quickly combust too – she admits she 'totally lost it' while preparing for her current solo show, Miss Subway NYC, at D'Stassi Art in London. The exhibition sees her vividly recreate a New York City subway station. There are paintings in eye-popping colours depicting trains, train yards and playful portraits of the characters you typically see there: a busker in a cat costume, an elderly lady with a shopping cart and a chihuahua. With the help of her husband, fellow graffiti artist Smith, she has even meticulously reproduced layers of tags on the walls from her halcyon days, when she would risk arrest – and sometimes her life – to spray across the city at night. On the show's opening night, more than 1,000 people showed up to pay their respects to the grande dame of graf. Lady Pink was born Sandra Fabara in Ambato, Ecuador, in 1964. Her story begins on her grandparents' sugarcane plantation in the Amazon rainforest – a vast, wild terrain that, like the snake who met its fate at her feet, didn't intimidate her. Her mother had returned after leaving Pink's father, an agricultural engineer who was a 'womaniser, gambler, cheater … '. As soon as she had enough money, when Pink was seven, they left Ecuador for New York City. 'When we came here, we had no papers, we didn't speak the language.' Pink was a self-assured, determined and talented kid who quickly learned how to channel her pain and grief into creativity. She first got into graffiti at 15, after her boyfriend was arrested for tagging and sent to live with relatives in Puerto Rico. 'I cried for a whole month, then I started tagging his name everywhere.' A painting in her London show of the artist as a teen kissing a handsome boy pays tribute to this defining moment in her personal history. When she started high school in Queens, she met 'kids who knew how to get into yards and tunnels. The more they said, 'You can't, you're a girl,' the more I had to prove them wrong. I was stubborn as a mule. I was crazy.' As one of the only women accepted by the notoriously macho graffiti scene in New York in the late 1970s, she quickly gained a reputation for tagging subway trains. 'We are like a guild, a clannish, tribal group who go out at night and watch each other's backs.' She later earned her official moniker 'Pink' from a fellow member of TC5 crew, Seen. 'I was the only female in the city painting, and I needed a female name so everyone would know our crew tolerated a female,' she explains. 'I knew I was the token female and that got my foot in the door – but to keep up with the big bad boys, I had to back it up with real talent too. There was sexism of course, but I'm a little bit of a badass. I don't appreciate being walked over and I stand up strongly for myself. Even if I'm petite, I'm loud. Don't judge me by my size, judge me by how big and fast I paint!' She added the 'Lady' title – at first inspired by the European nobility in the historical romance novels she was reading. 'But I don't write Lady – I'm terrible at the letter Y.' Later she used the Lady title to avoid confusion with the pop singer of the same name – who approached the artist to design her first album cover. 'I said, 'Hell no!' Are you kidding me? But she's a fan, I'm not going to say anything bad about her, she's fine, she sings fine.' As a young woman out at night in New York's most insalubrious neighbourhoods in 1979, Pink was especially vulnerable. 'I would dress like a boy and pretend to be a boy. The teens I ran with weren't much bigger than me and I knew they weren't there to protect me if shit went down. You're in the worst neighbourhoods of New York City relying on the kindness of strangers to save your life – you've got to be prepared. What happens in the dark alleys of cities, you don't want to know. You shake a spray can and hope they let you live.' 'Bombing' subway trains is one of the most perilous activities of graffiti – 'loads of kids have died doing it, getting run over by the trains or electrocuted. It still happens. It's live electricity: if you touch the rail you will die.' How did she survive? 'You don't stumble in like you're drunk, it's like a military manoeuvre. You know the train schedules, where to walk, where to hide. You have all of that figured out ahead of time. You need to be sure where you're going when you're running like panicked rats in the dark maze.' Sign up to Art Weekly Your weekly art world round-up, sketching out all the biggest stories, scandals and exhibitions after newsletter promotion Still, there were more than a few close calls over the years. She recalls she once sliced her finger open and 'it was bleeding badly, it was a terrible cut and I probably should have had it stitched, but I just stuck it in my pocket and it quietly bled in there. I didn't want people to say: 'Oh you're a girl you're hurt and crying, you're going to slow us down,' – you've got to be a good soldier.' Another time, there was a near miss with an unforeseen moving train. 'I had gone to pee and I thought I could just walk it,' she laughs. 'Then there was a train coming and it was doing a weird curve, slanting into the wall. At the last minute I ducked, but if I had stayed standing the train would've taken my head off. After that, I just ran at top speed. I can't believe I survived it.' The 1980s were a whirlwind. She rose to fame in 1983 after featuring in Wild Style, the cult film that launched American hip-hop culture globally. Her spray-painted canvases, horror vacui compositions with bold, attention-grabbing colours of scenes inspired by the street, began to be accepted in conventional, legal art spaces, and in 1984 she was included in MoMA PS1's The New Portrait alongside Alice Neel, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. 'No one was aware it was going to launch anything, we were just in it for the moment and the money. People told us the art market was fickle and eventually we'd have to get jobs.' Once she invited Haring to come to paint a train with her. 'Just me and him, no machismo – but dude was not down, he didn't want to cross the line of breaking laws. What he did was chalk on boards. He was a white dude; he wasn't incurring any kind of arrests. They weren't graffiti artists, but they were the original street artists. Graffiti artists work with spray, with fonts – and we hit stuff with wheels.' Pink also received an invitation from Jenny Holzer, who was wheatpasting her Truisms posters in Manhattan. 'We were like the only women going out at night doing things. She was a tall lady, like two metres, she would wear a hoodie and a big coat so she could pass off as a man going around at night alone. I am very small and I couldn't pass off like that, so I had to run with a crew. She reached out to me and suggested we collaborate.' Holzer had done up an entire building in the Lower East Side. 'It was wild out there at that time, there were a lot of people doing drugs, there was a lot of crime. But she made this beautiful, safe building, and I loved going there and working with her.' Holzer would prep three-metre-square canvases for Lady Pink to spray paint her images on, and Holzer paired them with text. The works were later shown at MoMA and Tate Modern. In 1983, 19-year-old Pink was photographed by Lisa Kahane wearing a vest emblazoned with Holzer's famous words: 'Abuse of power comes as no surprise' – in 2017 the photo went viral as an emblem of the #MeToo movement. Though artwork sales and interest did wane in the late 1980s, Pink pivoted. She set up a mural company with her husband, doing public commissions and working in communities. While many of her peers 'couldn't handle the business, they couldn't leave the ghetto behind, they couldn't show up on time or answer a phone call', she says she was able to 'adapt to polite society. Artists don't know how to hustle, and you've gotta hustle, hustle, hustle. Some don't have the cojones. But good grief, you've got to go knocking on doors!' She stopped illegally painting subway trains decades ago – 'now I save my crazy for the galleries' – but the spirit of the subway lives on in the London show. And she says she's still paying the price for her years of youthful rebellion. Twelve years ago, she and her husband moved upstate after 'one too many' police raids on their home in NYC. 'They took my stuff – including my husband – and messed with us. We had to spend money on an expensive attorney. They've told me to stick to the indoor stuff and not paint big old murals because they inspire people. I said yeah – community people, poets, artists, I should hope I inspire people!' One thing is for sure: she doesn't have any regrets. 'Street art is the biggest art movement, we are in every corner of the world. By whatever means possible, we are taking over this world, it's our whole plan! I think it's cool, man – you've got to take control of your environment. You don't need an MA to be an artist, you just need a little paint plus a little courage. Just do it!' Lady Pink: Miss Subway NYC is at D'Stassi Art, London, until late September.
The Guardian
8 hours ago
- The Guardian
An immaculately dressed equestrian under a pink sky: John Boaz's best photograph
When I was about 16, I went to Bradgate Park in Leicestershire with a couple of friends. We were there as sunset approached and the landscape became illuminated by beautiful golden-hour light. There were deer and stags all around and I asked one of my friends if I could borrow his camera. It must have been quite annoying for him because I remember wandering off, trying to capture this feeling of mystery and magic. That was the moment I first really felt a sense of excitement for photography and image-making. Before then, I'd visited many museums and art galleries with my mum and was inspired by some of the art we saw. I was particularly drawn to portraits by Vermeer and Rembrandt. I've never been good at drawing or painting, but having a camera gave me a tool to express that creative energy. While studying photography at university, I was introduced to mind-blowing work, like Alec Soth's book Sleeping by the Mississippi. I was struck by his portrait of a man holding a pair of model aeroplanes. There's a simplicity to the image, but it's also powerful and visually striking. I felt drawn to narrative-based documentary portraiture. For my final-year project, I spent time in monastic communities around Britain, making portraits of nuns, monks and other people I encountered within them. That branched out into one of the three long-term projects I'm currently working on, Rivers of Living Water, a wider-ranging series about the Christian faith in Britain, and the diverse nature of its cultures, denominations and perspectives. Fabian, who you see in this photograph, is someone I found on Instagram. I was inspired by his story of growing up in inner-city east London, where it was hard for him to pursue his love of horses. He persevered and now competes in eventing competitions, determined to help increase inclusivity in the equestrian community. He's set himself the goal of becoming a five-time Olympic gold medallist. This was taken in Hertfordshire, near the stables Fabian was using, on a January morning last year. Initially, I went to photograph him a few months before and while we had got some good images the light wasn't great and we agreed to try again later. On this occasion, just before sunrise, we got this soft pink sky and the field was still covered with beautiful morning frost. Fabian looks incredible in that outfit and the horse, Morgan, also looks amazing. My preferred approach is to take things slowly and spend time with my subject, create a calm energy and capture a sense of who they are. I rarely use film now, but my technique is informed by having used it – I don't take lots of photographs, but instead wait until there's a moment of stillness and peace. I love natural light: a lot of my work makes use of evening or morning light or mist. There's another shot of Fabian taken about an hour after this one that I'm equally happy with. By then, the frost had mostly gone but the rising winter sun created strong shadows and a warmer tone. In both cases, I didn't want the photographs to appear staged, I wanted something simple and genuine. I chose to photograph Fabian because I found his story interesting and inspiring. These portraits are about him and his equestrian journey. They are also included in the Rivers of Living Water series. The project encompasses spirituality, peace and serenity, but not every image is obviously religious. There are many that show people going about their everyday lives. My approach is always to try to be respectful and to honour the people I photograph. It's a way of exploring my own personal faith, too. Born: Northamptonshire, Visual communication degree at Birmingham City 'Paintings are a major inspiration for my work and music, too, helps me develop ideas. I'd name Alec Soth, Alys Tomlinson and Bryan Schutmaat as inspirational.'High point: 'Being one of the winners of Portrait of Britain Volume 7 and having one of my portraits as the front cover of the book. Also having my work selected to be part of this year's Royal Photographic Society International Photography point: 'I sometimes have creative low moments when I feel drained and not inspired or motivated but this does not last long, thankfully. This year a low point was not being chosen as a finalist in the Belfast Photo festival – however Rivers of Living Water was shortlisted so I am grateful for that.'Top tip: 'Stay true to who you are and make work you feel led to make. Be inspired by others but do not compare your work in a negative way to them. Be kind and supportive to other artists/photographers' work and their journey.' John Boaz's work is part of the RPS International Photography exhibition is at the Saatchi Gallery, London, 5 August to 18 September.
