Epistemic Resistance: What U.S. Universities Can Learn from Ukrainian Art
Ukrainian wartime art, marked by resilience to Russia’s neocolonial violence, offers U.S. academia not only insight, but also a method of resisting violence, erasure, and authoritarianism.(All the views expressed in this article are my own.) When, in 2024, I began a series of research-led exhibitions aimed at integrating Ukrainian art practices into the global context, my primary aim was to bring Ukrainian art to U.S. universities to establish a productive interdisciplinary dialogue with academic communities and ensure Ukrainian art’s greater visibility in university-level teaching and research. I hoped to find an appropriate scholarly niche for Ukrainian art history, and to facilitate the introduction of contemporary Ukrainian topics into non-region-focused syllabi across university subjects and programs, ranging from Slavic, Eastern European, and international studies to art history and art practice. In this text, I explore my own experiences curating exhibitions of Ukrainian art in U.S. academic contexts and analyze how these shows create potential resonances between Ukrainian and U.S. activist cultural movements. I also discuss some specific works of Ukrainian art included in these exhibitions and examine the ways these works preserve a space for both knowledge and agency.
Exhibition view of The Rift: Ukrainian Art in Resistance, University of Kansas, Edgar Heap of Birds Family Gallery, January 17 – February 16, 2024. Curated by Svitlana Biedarieva. Works by Yevgenia Belorusets, Maria Kulikovska, and Alevtina Kakhidze (left to right).
The exhibition series that I launched thus aims to foster the production of critical and art historical texts about Ukrainian art and to bring visibility to Ukrainian wartime resistance through art. Through my curatorial work, I also hope to generate direct encounters with university communities that expand the methods and perspectives of research on art and through art and its display. The research-led component of the exhibitions I have recently curated has been informed by my own and my colleagues’ investigations into wartime Ukrainian art, identity, trauma, and resistance, such as my recent edited volume Art in Ukraine between Identity Construction and Anti-Colonial Resistance (2024) and my monograph Ambicoloniality and War: The Ukrainian-Russian Case (2024).(Svitlana Biedarieva, Ambicoloniality and War: The Ukrainian-Russian Case (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2024); Svitlana Biedarieva, ed., Art in Ukraine between Identity Construction and Anti-Colonial Resistance (London and New York: Routledge 2024).) My curatorial practice, as well as my scholarly inquiry, draws on conceptual frameworks from decolonial theory, visual studies, and memory politics, and I not only examine artists’ works, but actively engage them through interdisciplinary research by including artistic texts, historical materials, and audiovisual documentation of artists’ working processes, merging the methodologies of academic and artistic research.
Olia Mykhailiuk, Noone Is an Island. Mariupol, 2021–2023. Exhibition view of The Rift: Ukrainian Art in Resistance, University of Kansas, 2024.
In 2024, I curated the exhibition The Rift: Ukrainian Wartime Art at the University of Kansas, which focused on the ways Ukrainian artists resisted Russia’s use of destruction and manipulative propaganda to physically and symbolically erase Ukrainian society’s subjectivity and legacy.(The Rift: Ukrainian Art in Resistance, January 17 – February 16, 2024, Edgar Heap of Birds Family Gallery, University of Kansas. Organized by the KU Department of Visual Art.) The exhibition included the work of Piotr Armianovski, Yevgenia Belorusets, Alevtina Kakhidze, Dana Kavelina, Maria Kulikovska, Olia Mykhailiuk, and Elena Subach. The Rift examined identity transformations and decolonizing practices in Ukrainian art as seen through the lens of cultural resistance. The exhibition explored how Ukrainian art passed through several stages of reflection between 2014 and 2023: from the documentation and recording of the events to their critical interpretation through the creation of new emancipatory discourses in art. The exhibition did not just showcase artworks—it interrogated the function of art as the source of knowledge in times of violence and explored the construction of collective memory and identity by cultural means.
In the process of preparing this exhibition, I established a meaningful dialogue with the work by literary scholar Vitaly Chernetsky—both through a panel discussion in which we took part and through references to his research, which interprets Russian colonialism in Ukraine as an example of epistemic violence. Chernetsky’s work has been instrumental in helping me understand how “epistemic agency” (after philosopher Kristie Dotson) helps overcoming “epistemic injustice” (after philosopher Miranda Fricker), as a consolidated, unified, and diverse movement of those suffering from the violence of imposed knowledge—and the inability to express their own voices.(Vitaly Chernetsky, “Russia’s War against Ukraine: Confronting Epistemic Injustice,” Cambridge Stasiuk Lecture 2023, 24 February 2023; Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); and Kristie Dotson, “Conceptualizing epistemic oppression,” Social Epistemology. A Journal of Knowledge, Culture, and Policy, Vol. 28, No. 2 (2014), pp. 115-138.) At the panel discussion, in which artist Alevtina Kakhidze also participated, we talked about this precise shift in expression following the full-scale invasion, when Ukrainian resistance on the front line fostered heartfelt resistance through culture and the “unsilencing” of Ukrainian voices.(Panel Discussion “Ukrainian Art After 2014: Resistance, Decoloniality, and Documentation of the War”, University of Kansas, Edgar Heap of Birds Gallery, January 17, 2024. Participants: Svitlana Biedarieva, Vitaly Chernetsky, and Alevtina Kakhidze. Moderated by Benjamin Rosenthal.)
Exhibition view of RESISTANCE: Ukrainian Art of Freedom, Michigan State University, Scene Metrospace Gallery, February 24 – March 21, 2025. Curated by Svitlana Biedarieva. Works by Serhiy Zhadan, Lesia Khomenko, Olia Mykhailiuk, and Mykola Ridnyi (left to right)
Building upon these debates, I continued this series and developed the 2025 exhibition entitled RESISTANCE: Ukrainian Art of Freedom, which I curated at Michigan State University (MSU). This exhibition featured several of the same artists (Piotr Armianovski, Yevgenia Belorusets, Alevtina Kakhidze, Maria Kulikovska, Olia Mykhailiuk, and Elena Subach), as well as Lesia Khomenko, Mykola Ridnyi, and Serhiy Zhadan. My experience with RESISTANCE has shown that art is an essential tool for introducing Ukrainian cultural models of protest and resistance to U.S. art historians and social science scholars, especially at dark times like these.(RESISTANCE: Ukrainian Art of Freedom, February 24 – March 21, 2025, SCENE Metrospace Gallery, Michigan State University. Organized by the Center for European and Eurasian Studies and the Department of Art, Art History, and Design at MSU.) Within only a year, we can observe a significant shift: Ukrainian art has come not only to represent Ukrainian society’s struggle for liberty, but it is also becoming a valuable lesson in resilience and collective solidarity for U.S. university audiences. Ukrainian art practices—understood as methods, rather than merely illustrations—are thus transforming from an object of study to an active handbook of how to resist violence, from epistemic to symbolic and physical. These artistic practices offer insights about how to oppose political manipulation that attempts deception, suppresses freedom of expression, and deprives people of basic human rights. Moreover, they have the strong potential to transform the U.S. universities too. The research methodology of the exhibitions allows for the sharing of these approaches through visual means and teaching and via mediated conversation, incorporating them into the academy in a way that resonates with the contemporary values promoted by the liberal arts.
Lesia Khomenko, Working on User-Generated Footage from the Russian-Ukrainian War, 2025. Image courtesy of the artist.
The exhibitions The Rift and RESISTANCE thus interweave texts, images, and video to create a comprehensive narrative, producing links to cutting-edge academic research. In doing so, they both become part of this research and incorporate it in a process of exchange. One example of how artworks included in the exhibitions become part of a growing body of research is artist Lesia Khomenko’s Working on User-Generated Footage from the Russian-Ukrainian War (2025), commissioned for the RESISTANCE exhibition, which shows—for the first time—the working process of the artist who “slices” found footage of Russian war crimes into separate images and then uses these elements in her abstract works focusing on the bodily and environmental impact of violence. The investigation, forensic inquiry, a detached view of the working process, and the societal dynamics underpinning it all resonate with the concerns of scholarly study.
These shows demonstrate that the two main concerns of Ukrainian artists are neocolonial aggression and personal agency in active resistance against it. Speaking from—and about—a ruined (yet undefeated) land, the artists address the topics of participatory democracy, contested memory, collectivity, and self-determination. They also defend their rights to produce new knowledge by both reflecting upon and impacting the traumatic events that surround them, turning from eyewitnesses to active agents of change, and obtaining epistemic agency.
Exhibition view of RESISTANCE: Ukrainian Art of Freedom, Michigan State University, Scene Metrospace Gallery, February 24 – March 21, 2025. Curated by Svitlana Biedarieva. Works by Elena Subach, Serhiy Zhadan, and Lesia Khomenko (left to right).
Both exhibitions focused on a multiplicity of perspectives: they presented Ukrainian artists who might disagree on questions of language, on certain ideological left-right-central standpoints, or on cultural conventions. These artists are nonetheless consolidated in their decisive resistance to Russian attempts at annihilating Ukrainian culture and subordinating, if not destroying, Ukrainian society. Russian violence precisely aims to deprive this society of agency, stripping it of the diversity and polyphony that are key to resistance. The newest art from Ukraine focuses on this agency and, in addressing it, by bringing it under the spotlight, restores it. Generally, we can observe that Ukrainian artists are much more preoccupied with the question of agency than of identity, which is becoming increasingly more diverse, multifaceted, and polydirectional, both rooted and globalized. Their work advances horizontality as the core of collective resistance.
In the Ukrainian case, we speak about resistance to neocolonialism, referencing the most grotesque and violent traits of centuries of Russian colonialism. Meanwhile, the case of the United States is quite different: democracy facing its collapse risks descending into a systemic violence of its own by turning its gaze back to its colonizing origins, imperial ambitions, and the colonial erasure that affects diversity and causes forced uprootedness. Fricker, in her writing on epistemic injustice, proposes that structural power is more likely to create a collective hermeneutical gap within situated inequality, when selected elites (in the proximity of the systemic core) obtain knowledge-production privileges, in contrast to marginalized others.(Fricker, Epistemic Injustice, pp. 7-10.) She confronts this situation with what she calls “agential power,” defined as the soft action of individuals and institutions, which resists epistemic injustice. Currently, U.S. universities need to resist both their forced displacement from the center of structural power and the simultaneous suppression of their agential action. However, can there be power at all in this shattered, upside-down structure that we observe, with a fair degree of horror?
Elena Subach. From the Hidden series, 2022. Exhibition view of The Rift: Ukrainian Art in Resistance, University of Kansas, 2024.
As Hannah Arendt puts it, where the emptiness of power emerges, violence takes its place. It is, therefore, not a sign of authority, but of powerlessness.(Hannah Arendt, On Violence (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1970), p. 53.) I use this maxim in my latest book—Ambicoloniality and War—when discussing Russian colonialism and its obsession with Ukrainian territory.(Biedarieva, Ambicoloniality and War.) This same powerlessness—resulting in physical violence (deportations and infringement of the rights of migrants, the division of families), epistemic violence (the closure of research programs and media, and the prosecution of students and professors), and symbolic violence (the revisionist monumental proposal for a new pantheon of heroes, aligned with the regime’s ideology)—can be observed in the recent situation in the U.S. Sources for the preservation of agency can, however, be found in American history, with the long-lasting anti-colonial movement of the oppressed Indigenous population, the Black emancipatory movement fighting for recognition and acknowledgement, and the decolonial struggle of the queer community that led to significant epistemological shifts. These similarities can create a bridge of understanding between the U.S. situation and the challenges faced by Ukrainian society—even though it persists in a different context, that of foreign invasion and attempts at the erasure of knowledge by brutal force and media intervention. This is the outpost that the academic community is bound to hold: using knowledge to preserve society’s history and self-awareness from oblivion. The exhibitions discussed here, specifically created for academic audiences—where interdisciplinary solidarity intersects with the exchange of research insights and archiving—are one more method for this meticulous work of protection.
Mykola Ridnyi, From the Blind Spot series, 2014. Image courtesy of the artist.
One of the works at the exhibition at MSU, Mykola Ridnyi’s photograph series Blind Spot (2014), marked the beginning of the events in 2014, a time when Russia’s aggressive war against Ukraine remained only partly visible to the public eye. In this work, camouflaging images of wartime ruins with black paint, the artist criticizes the ways in which the full scale of violence remains obscure even from within, and how society is unwilling to see beyond the smokescreen of media reports. Violence in all its multidimensionality, as a rule, starts at a blind spot. This condition, this blind spot, makes America of today strikingly similar to Ukraine in 2013-2014. Ruination takes on different dimensions, and the only way it can be stopped and turned into regeneration is the collective striving for change and the creation of support networks that would oppose the spread of authoritarianism and defend the basic human values that are in danger of slipping away into the shadows of chaos and uncertainty.
Ukrainian art, after 2014, evolved into an art of resistance, an art of protest, but also an art of contemplation and the thorough analysis of the causes of violence and remedies for it. In this metamorphosis, the artists had to perform more than one role: eyewitnesses recording the traumatic events and the history-in-the-making unfolding in front of them, and also direct participants in the events, bringing in their own self-determination to bridge the resilient hope with traumatizing reality. The research component of the exhibition builds on this new objectivity that makes the Ukrainian art included in them not only a critical but an investigative and analytical method, cross-fertilizing with the main preoccupations of academia at large and in its protest aspect with the student community in particular.
Maria Kulikovska, 254. Action, 2014–2023. Exhibition view of The Rift: Ukrainian Art in Resistance, University of Kansas, 2024.
Maria Kulikovska’s performance 254. Action (2014–2023), video- and photo-documentation of which I included in both exhibitions, was first staged in Russia following the occupation of Crimea and focused on the uneasy fact that, under the influence of propaganda and oppression society loses the capacity to feel for the other, and in dark times of tyranny, it is particularly important to preserve this sensitivity. It is necessary to preserve agency in the face of fear, which can be overcome by knowledge in all its aspects: prioritizing the understanding of local contexts without losing sight of the larger picture, embracing diversity, building an understanding of collective aims and methods of collaboration, and—most importantly—loudly proclaiming this knowledge, speaking out against injustices. The experience of the U.S. universities in their protests against violence in Gaza, for example, and the practical grassroots knowledge developed by it—that of encampments, teach-ins, and field workshops—can be expanded to the defense of not only others but ourselves, protecting against censorship, the infringement of human rights, forced displacement, and cuts to the funding of universities and research programs. Field action, however, is only effective if it goes hand-in-hand with both substantial protection and production of knowledge. The academic community is one of the strongest outposts of the preservation of knowledge of society—and the production of new knowledge with a long-lasting impact. It is important to retain this standpoint at a time when academic liberties are oppressed.
Alevtina Kakhidze, Invasions, Invasions 1.2.3., and Botanical Victims projects. Exhibition view of RESISTANCE: Ukrainian Art of Freedom, Michigan State University, 2025.
Ukraine’s situation rests on a profound hope that no crime goes unpunished when the evidence is preserved and eyewitnesses speak. The main things that Ukrainian art and research alike can teach—through exhibitions and texts—are to break the silence imposed by fear, to be epistemically disobedient, and to demand epistemic justice. In the U.S., during a time of uncontrollably unfolding censorship when institutions risk collapsing, and individual liberties are endangered by epistemic violence, these three capacities are of the utmost importance. While values are rapidly becoming inverted and the very concept of “diversity” is prohibited, art can also overcome censorship by focusing on agency in creating and maintaining knowledge. The seeming fragmentation and devastation of the peripheral discourse, of those new subalterns and oppressed (of which the academic community is becoming an increasingly larger part), must resonate in the center, as it actively resists being pushed away from the public focus.
Alevtina Kakhidze and Piotr Armianovski, Invasions 1.2.3., still from a 360-degree film, 2022. Image courtesy of the artists.
Alevtina Kakhidze’s and Piotr Armianovski’s 360-degree immersive film Invasions 1.2.3. (2022) is not merely a tribute to the destruction that has occurred in the Kyiv region in the aftermath of the Russian reckless full-scale invasion in the spring of 2022. It is also a rhetorical comment on the illusion that we can turn our gaze away from violence. The artists remind us that we cannot simply close our eyes to ruination and atrocity, as their evidence will infinitely return to us with the image of the ruin. The deep symbolism of ruin is intertwined with the actual context of destruction, and Ukrainian art serves as a cautionary reminder of how fragile peaceful living is, as well as a testimony to society’s strength in the face of crisis—stronger than its enemies would think. The exhibitions The Rift and RESISTANCE have focused on these questions, proposing a multifaceted perspective on the visibility of evil and the existence of a remedy from it. This remedy takes the form of interdisciplinary collaboration, critical and intellectually compelling in its essence and at the same time deeply rooted in the wider action of physical resistance.
The situations in Ukraine and the U.S. may seem profoundly different: with Ukraine struggling with Russian neocolonialism and the U.S. struggling with the internal revanchism of ruling elites, but these are still two sides of the same burning world that we are facing. Perhaps, the main lesson to be learned from the comprehensive narrative of the exhibitions The Rift and RESISTANCE is that we are here to record and resist injustices, and our resilience is not in vain so long as we hold together, against all fears, threats, and even against minimal odds of winning. The Ukrainian case teaches us that epistemic violence erasing identities and agency alike should be overcome. Silence should be broken.
Yevgenia Belorusets, Places. Mykolaiv Region, September − October 2024. Exhibition view of RESISTANCE: Ukrainian Art of Freedom, Michigan State University, 2025.
The student community, as one of the most dynamic and mobile ones, is often at the vanguard of grassroots changes, initiating social movements and serving as the guiding force behind significant social transformations. One of Ukraine’s lesser-known Maidan revolutions—yet one of incomparable historical importance—occurred shortly before the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1990 and received the poetic name of “Revolution on Granite.” Initiated by protesting students, this first, uneven step to the liberation forced major changes at the watershed moment, with the Ukrainian exit from the Soviet Union, breaking free from decades-long oppression. This was also largely the case with Euromaidan in Ukraine in 2014, when the attack launched on students by the police forces supporting then-president, pro-Russian dictator Viktor Yanukovych, showed the real-life value of resistance to violence in Ukrainian society.
Facing explicit violence for the first time in decades, after a significant chronological gap since the active emancipatory and decolonial struggles of Black Americans, Indigenous peoples, women, and queer communities in the U.S. context can be confusing. It is difficult to recognize this violence as a systemic phenomenon, as society tends to rationalize it as merely a systemic error, and then another one, and so on—until it is too late. Similarly, the taste of authoritarianism is hard to recognize until it poisons the collective body to the point of no return. The sensitivity and attention—looking at peripheral evidence and accepting that our previous, peaceful knowledge is no longer valid under new, cruel circumstances—are key to resisting epistemic violence and the quest for justice. Ukrainian art teaches that resistance is an epistemic practice, that art can expose and repair collective trauma, and that silence, once broken, can reshape history.
New dark ages are arriving, but it is up to us if we permit them to define our lives.
