Tag Archives: Soviet Union

Art

How UNESCO Supports Exiled Ukrainian Women Artists

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Paris, 9 June 2022 – UNESCO is launching a scheme to support Ukrainian women artists who have had to flee their country because of the war, in partnership with the NGO Perpetuum Mobile. It will enable them and their children to be hosted and cared for by a cultural institution in the country where they have found refuge.

“The war has driven millions of Ukrainians into exile, the vast majority of whom are women and children. Among these people, women artists who have been forced to suspend their creative activities often lack material and financial resources to resume their work in their host country,” says Audrey Azoulay, UNESCO’s Director-General.

For this reason, UNESCO decided to launch a programme dedicated to Ukrainian women artists in exile, born of a partnership with the NGO Perpetuum Mobile, initiator of the Artists at Risk platform, which brings together cultural institutions in over 15 countries.

Audrey Azoulay

The artists concerned will be supported for a minimum of three months by a cultural institution in their host country.

They will be taken care of with their children in artistic residencies, and will benefit from support in terms of networking, visibility and the conception of new cultural projects.

(Left) Ukraine electro-pop duo Bloom Twins: “It has really affected us,” said singer Anna Kuprienko. “We’re talking to our family, we have a lot of friends and our second manager living there. We go back to the Ukraine quite a lot. We were only there two months ago. We were hopeful that this situation with Russia wouldn’t go where it has and that it would resolve.” (Right) Ukraine singer Khrystyna Soloviy : “We are a generation that has never seen the Soviet Union and was born in a free Ukraine. Ukrainians are not Russians, as said by the Russian government. We have a difficult, depressed history of Russian colonisation.”

The scheme will aim to provide them with the means to become autonomous by the end of their hosting period, whether they then choose to return to live in Ukraine or to settle permanently in their host country. UNESCO has already set aside $140,000 usd (about $177,000 cad at time of this publication) to finance the scheme, which should initially benefit some 30 artists and their children.

A new link in UNESCO’s emergency response

The programme complements the range of emergency measures already deployed by UNESCO since the beginning of the war to safeguard tangible and intangible cultural heritage, secure museum collections and combat illicit trafficking in cultural property.

UNESCO partner Freemuse

Moreover, since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, UNESCO has been monitoring the situation of artists in close consultation with artists’ networks and cultural actors in the country. This work is also carried out in coordination with international organizations involved in supporting artists at risk: PEN America’s Artists at Risk Connection, Perpetuum Mobile/Artists at Risk, ICORN, Freemuse, Prince Claus Fund and the PAUSE programme. For the Silo, Lucía Iglesias Kuntz, UNESCO Press Service.

Featured image: Face of War (Putin in bullets) co-created by Daria Marchenko, 35 now exiled Ukraine woman artist.

Comics

WW2 Smartphone Graphic Novel Katusha

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KATUSHA VOLUME ONE: EDGE OF DARKNESS, the first of a three volume graphic novel series by historical graphic novelist Wayne Vansant, is now available exclusively in digital format from digital publishing imprint Grand Design Communications.

The painting Kateryna by the Ukrainian poet and painter Taras Shevchenko (1814-1861)influenced Katusha. Kateryna tells the story of a Ukrainian country girl who is seduced and abandoned by a Russian cavalry officer.

KATUSHA is a coming-of-age story set in the Eastern Front of World War II, following the life of a Ukrainian farm girl Ekaterina Tymoshenko, nicknamed Katusha, starting with the invasion of the Soviet Union by Nazi Germany in 1941. The three-volume graphic novel, which when finished will total 540 pages, follows her journey from farm girl to partisan fighter to tank commander in the Red Army, along the way participating in the Battles of Stalingrad and Berlin, among others.

During the second world war, hundreds of thousands of Soviet women served in the Red Army as pilots, snipers, tank drivers and other essential roles. Although KATUSHA is a work of fiction, Vansant based his story on interviews he conducted with living veterans in Ukraine and extensive research. He will return for another trip this fall, to conduct more interviews and do research on locations.

Lviv, Ukraine, 26 October 2010 – Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper is joined by Ukrainian officials as he pays tribute to Ukrainian poet, artist, and humanist Taras Shevchenko.

KATUSHA VOLUME ONE: EDGE OF DARKNESS, the first of three volumes, is out now exclusively in digital format for iPhone, iPad, Android, and in-browser reading. It is available in two formats – as six separate chapters priced at $.99usd each and as a single one hundred eighty page edition priced at $4.99usd, and can be purchased through iVerse’s ComicsPlus app and from Grand Design’s electronic storefront on iVerse’s website.

A native of Marbleton, Georgia, writer/artist Wayne Vansant has created many historical graphic novels – both fiction and non-fiction – in a career spanning more than twenty five years. His non-fiction graphic novel about the Allied invasion of Europe in World War II, NORMANDY, were be published in September by Zenith Press.

His recent collaboration with writer Dwight Jon Zimmerman, THE HAMMER AND THE ANVIL (2012), a graphic novel about Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and the end of slavery in America was published by Hill and Wang, and Vansant was the primary artist for Marvel’s The ‘Nam for more than five years.

His other non-fiction graphic novels on military history include DAYS OF DARKNESS, ANTIETAM: THE FIERY TRIAL (with the United States National Park Service), BLOCKADE: THE CIVIL WAR AT SEA, and THE VIETNAM WAR: A GRAPHIC HISTORY.