To have a look at Sana Shahmuradova Tanska’s work is to sense that one thing is awry, with out fairly realizing why. A sequence of canvases hanging in Artspace in Woolloomooloo as a part of the Biennale of Sydney depicts unusual, fantastical scenes that stroll a line between Dionysian and dystopic: bare feminine figures in molten, fiery landscapes; mussels with moony faces swimming subsequent to protean, fish-like kinds; anthropomorphic suns weeping over rural landscapes.
A lot of the work had been created within the artist’s studio in Kyiv, Ukraine – some earlier than Russia’s “full invasion” of the nation on 24 February 2022, and others instantly after. “That’s simply how I preserve observe of time,” she says. “It’s like this line earlier than and after.”
Shahmuradova Tanska began portray after what she describes as a “traumatic immigration expertise”. In 2013, simply after she completed highschool, the artist, her mom and brother emigrated from their house in Odesa to Toronto, Canada. It was simply earlier than the Euromaidan protests of early 2014, a flashpoint in Ukraine’s ongoing wrestle in opposition to Russian affect, that led to the ousting of the Kremlin-backed president Viktor Yanukovych, after which Russia’s annexation of Crimea.
“I felt horrible as a result of I actually felt I wanted to be again [in Ukraine],” Shahmuradova Tanska says, talking in Sydney forward of the biennale opening in early March. “I received very depressed. I simply began drawing, drawing on a regular basis.”
Whereas learning arts and psychology at college, she moonlighted as an assistant to the Toronto-based artist Darby Milbrath, studying tips on how to stretch and prime canvases and work with oils, mixing them with solvents to attain a washed look. Every summer season break, she returned to Ukraine, the place her father and grandmother nonetheless stay. Shortly after graduating in 2020, and as Covid struck, she determined to maneuver again completely – however to Kyiv.
Again in her house nation, she transitioned from part-time painter to full-time artist. “I might strive many issues to earn money, however [painting was] one thing I might all the time simply proceed to be doing,” she says. “Mentally, it was unavoidable.”
After the Russian invasion, art-making grew to become a compulsive response to trauma; a receptacle for experiences, reminiscences, desires and hopes, as she processed the acute stress of the early days of the conflict, then the continued nervousness of residing in a conflict zone.
Two of the works within the biennale had been made in her grandmother’s shed within the rural area of Podillia, the place the artist retreated for the primary three months of the conflict, which coincided with spring. One of many work exhibits a sheep and an abstracted determine sowing seeds, beneath a weeping solar, with a cross within the background – a mixture of Christian iconography and mystical symbols that calls to thoughts the surreal tableaux of William Blake and Marc Chagall. “The sowing of the fields [that year] was disturbed by shelling, and we misplaced a lot grain,” says Shahmuradova Tanska. “The solar is sort of like this god: it stands for good issues, however on the similar time, it may well’t do something about what’s taking place.”
The canvas is small. Shahmuradova Tanska explains that she left Kyiv in a rush after the invasion, packing solely important objects and no artwork provides. “I keep in mind saying goodbye to my residence for ever. I used to be like, ‘I’ve to simply accept the prospect that I’ll by no means be again.’” Finally, pals had been in a position to ship her a small provide of canvas.
She was in a position to return to Kyiv in the summertime of 2022, and a number of other of probably the most putting works in her biennale exhibit had been made throughout this era, together with a sequence of work that includes feminine figures in vivid pink hues.
“I actually tried to repeat the way in which I used to be working, and the palette, earlier than the invasion. However it wasn’t profitable: it was the identical paint [and] the identical pigments I might normally use, but it surely was one thing else, it was very hysterical – regardless that I used to be fairly joyful to be again … solely now, taking a look at these work, [I am] realising what was taking place [at the time],” she displays.
As she processed her trauma by means of portray, she additionally got here to see her artwork as a political device, “some of the credible methods to speak what’s taking place [in Ukraine]”. In 2022, one among her artworks was featured in a pro-Ukraine music video by Pink Floyd, and as her worldwide profile has risen, through residencies and exhibitions, she continues to platform the nation’s plight.
Whereas she is in Sydney, Shahmuradova Tanska longs to get again to Kyiv. A traditional day entails an early begin and a stroll together with her associate, who has a studio in the identical constructing: a former scientific institute from the Soviet period. When there are air raids, everybody within the constructing – and plenty of from close by – shelters for wherever between quarter-hour and a number of other hours in its basement bunker, constructed in the course of the chilly conflict to resist nuclear assault, the partitions nonetheless pasted with hand-drawn tutorial posters in Russian.
It’s been two years for the reason that invasion, and Shahmuradova Tanska describes a scrambled sense of time and id, during which the boundaries between previous and current, between particular person and communal, have blurred. Waking experiences and desires mix, and tales her grandfather instructed her about his experiences within the first world conflict resonate uncannily with issues taking place to her now. “There isn’t a time distance between my grandfather’s trauma and mine,” she says.
This week, Kyiv is being pounded by Russian missiles once more. Over e mail, Shahmuradova Tanska writes: “One other instance of this vivid feeling that previous and current are merging: the humanities academy that was partially destroyed by a Russian missile yesterday [the Kyiv State Academy of Decorative and Applied Arts and Design] was based by Mykhailo Boychuk, again in 1917; he was executed by NKVD [the predecessor to Russia’s KGB] collectively along with his college students in 1937 merely for being Ukrainian artists.”
