The Ukrainian artist Maria Kulikovska has recreated three sculptures that were installed outside the Izolyatsia art centre in Donetsk but destroyed by Russia-backed separatist fighters last summer. Kulikovska says the rebels used her works—cast in soap from a mould of her own body—as shooting targets. “They said that’s what would happen to real people who do not agree with them,” she says.
The new works, also titled Homo Bulla, are on show at the Saatchi gallery in London as part of an exhibition featuring 30 emerging artists aged between 18 and 35 from the UK and Ukraine (until 3 January). In a performance to mark the opening of the show, a naked Kulikovska smashed up one of her sculptures with a hammer. “It’s my response to the terrorists that I am the owner of my body and my life. It is also a feminist stance; no one has the right to destroy images of women,” she says.
The separatists who seized the former insulation factory that housed Izolyatsia denounced Kulikovska’s work as “degenerate”, she says. A number of other works, including an installation by Pascale Marthine Tayou, were also destroyed or cut up for scrap metal. The building that once also housed Kader Attia's work, Ce N'est Rien, is now a prison and interrogation centre. Large-scale site-specific works by Daniel Buren, Cai Guo-Qiang and Leandro Erlich, among others, were too big for fleeing staff to rescue.
Kulikovska, who was among the group of artists who staged a mock-occupation of the Russian pavilion at the Venice Biennale this year, says there is virtually no culture left in Donetsk and Crimea. “Everything has been destroyed,” she says, noting that the picture is brighter in Kiev.
Izolyatsia reopened in Kiev in February, although the organisation is unsure how long it will stay there. “Artists are working harder than ever before because we understand you can stop violence, but not with guns,” Kulikovska says.
Kulikovska was born in Kerch, Ukraine, which has been occupied by Russia since 2014. “I lost my house and my family,” she says, “my work is a comment on my own life.”
The gallery also launched the first UK/raine prize, which was awarded this year to Sergiy Petlyuk. The category winners are Roman Mikhaylov, Sergiy Petlyuk, Dominic Beattie, Jamie Fitzpatrick and Dima Mykytenko. The £75,000 award is supported by the Firtash Foundation, a charitable fund that promotes Ukrainian culture abroad.