When Artists Go to War: Researching Cultural Memory in Ukraine

Halyna Hleba is an art historian and curator of exhibition projects, public, and educational programs on Ukrainian art. She examines how artistic practices function as cultural documentation, forms of resistance, and instruments of memory-making. She holds a degree in Art History and Theory from the National Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture, and an MA in Memory Studies and Public History from the Kyiv School of Economics. Her curatorial and academic work explores the role of artists in shaping collective memory and public historical narratives. 

Throughout 2025/2026, Halyna is a Petro Jacyk Non-Residential Scholar. The Petro Jacyk Program created this scholarship opportunity in 2022 with support of CEES and the Petro Jacyk Education Foundation in response to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. PJP’s goal is to give opportunities to Ukraine-based scholars to continue their work during the war, when many scholars had their professional activities interrupted. Since 2022, 58 Ukrainian scholars have received this support.

What is your current research focus? 

My current research examines Ukrainian artists who have joined the armed forces since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, focusing on how military service reshapes artistic practice, authorship, and identity. I am particularly interested in the liminal identity that emerges between soldier and artist.

For many, artistic practice has not been suspended by war but continues in fragmented, unstable forms within military life, where artistic identity must coexist with responsibilities that differ radically from those normally associated with artistic work. In the Ukrainian context, this is both new and historically significant, as many artists, curators, and cultural workers are directly experiencing military service, often in active combat roles.

This situation departs from traditional Western art historical frameworks, where war art has typically been linked to official commissions or programs in which artists were deployed to document conflict. In Ukraine today, artists who join the armed forces are not observers but soldiers first, carrying out military duties and living under the same physical and psychological conditions as others in service.

Since the full-scale invasion, members of the cultural community have faced a profound dilemma: whether to preserve the freedom to remain artists, sometimes continuing their work abroad, or to set aside that role in favor of what they perceive as a civic responsibility to defend the country.

My research therefore asks how artistic practice transforms when the usual conditions of production disappear: what it means to create without a studio, without time, and often without the emotional or physical capacity for sustained work. Rather than representing war, these works often function as traces of lived experience, situated at the intersection of survival, reflection, ethical conflict, and artistic expression.

How has your research evolved over time? 

My research grew out of an interest in how contemporary Ukrainian artists respond to war and how artistic practices function as forms of cultural documentation and memory-making. Through my work as a co-founder of projects such as The Wartime Art Archive, I became particularly interested in the moment when artistic responses emerge while historical events are still unfolding.

This interest deepened during my MA studies in Memory Studies and Public History at the Kyiv School of Economics (2023–2025), where my focus shifted from wartime artistic production broadly to a more specific question: how the experience of war is articulated through the perspectives of those directly involved. I examined how soldiers’ lived experiences enter visual and artistic language, how such expressions may shape future cultural memory, and the terminological challenges surrounding artistic practices that have emerged since Russia’s full-scale invasion.

My attention increasingly turned to artists who had joined the armed forces. In analyzing these practices, I began to question whether existing art historical categories are sufficient to describe them, particularly when artistic work is produced by individuals whose current roles are defined by military service while their professional and personal identity remains that of an artist.

This past winter, I curated the public program of the Polish-Ukrainian exhibition project Different Places 2 at the National Art Museum of Ukraine, using the museum setting to explore these questions. The program included conversations with artists serving in the military, a thematic lecture, and author-led exhibition tours that approached the works through memory studies, public history, and lived experiences of military service.

For me, this curatorial work allows me to observe how artists articulate their experiences in real time and how institutions begin to document these testimonies as events unfold. It also reflects a research-grounded curatorial approach that treats exhibitions and public programs not only as spaces of presentation, but as platforms for inquiry, documentation, and collective interpretation.

In what ways has the Petro Jacyk Program influenced your work? 

The Petro Jacyk Program has provided an important intellectual environment for developing my research within an international academic context. It creates space to examine questions related to Ukrainian history, culture, and the ongoing Russian-Ukrainian war across disciplines, bringing together perspectives from art history, memory studies, and public history.

A particularly valuable aspect has been the opportunity to present my research and discuss it with colleagues from different academic backgrounds. These exchanges helped refine how I formulate my research questions on the experiences of Ukrainian artists in the current war, while encouraging me to situate this work within a longer historical perspective. They also opened a comparative direction for my research, prompting me to consider how the experiences of Ukrainian artists serving in the military today might be examined alongside earlier cases, including the First and Second World Wars and the Soviet-Afghan War.

Placing contemporary practices in relation to these contexts situates them within a broader history of artists encountering war, while also revealing how little the history of war representation in Ukrainian art has been systematically studied. It further highlights the continued influence of Soviet visual and ideological frameworks that shape how war imagery is understood in Ukrainian cultural memory today.

In this sense, the program has encouraged me to approach my research not only as a study of contemporary artistic practices during the Russian-Ukrainian war, but as part of a broader effort to understand how war has been visualized and interpreted in Ukrainian art over time.

Why do you think your research is particularly important today? 

This research matters because the Russian-Ukrainian war is not only a military conflict but one aimed at destroying Ukrainian society and culture. Culture does not exist in the abstract; it exists through people. Those serving in the Ukrainian army today include writers, artists, researchers, and other cultural and intellectual workers alongside representatives of many professions. The war destroys not only lives but the cultural and intellectual capacity of the country and its ability to grow and imagine its future. 

This is why it feels important to speak with artists who are currently serving, to listen to them, and to record their experiences as they unfold. These conversations preserve firsthand accounts that may later be difficult to reconstruct. Ukraine’s cultural history already contains significant gaps created by earlier waves of violence and repression, particularly in the twentieth century. Documenting these experiences now may help prevent further loss.

In this sense, I approach my research as a space for holding and engaging with these experiences. Through conversations and interviews with artists currently serving in the military, I am beginning to document a range of perspectives on war, artistic practice, and personal responsibility. I aim to develop the academic tools needed to analyze this plurality with care and precision. Ultimately, this work seeks to ensure that these voices are not lost, but become part of how this moment in Ukrainian history is studied and remembered.