Maria Vtorushina
In the Netherlands, where I conceived this text while moving between Kyiv, Maastricht, and Rotterdam (a surreal spectrum of contrasts: from the violence of war to a queer utopia bridged by 30 hours of travel), being queer means being proud and visible. Being a queer artist in Western Europe involves aestheticizing queer practice, making it sensual, and visualizing the ethics of love and care – much like the wonderful work of Melanie Bonajo, for instance. In these years since the full-scale war, I have met curators, top art managers, and editors who expected queer expressions in art to conform to a certain canon of festive, enriched visuality – one that, for now, feels incompatible with the lived experience in Ukraine. In contrast, queer art and artists in Ukraine, profoundly affected by war, face radically different challenges. This text is a modest attempt to highlight just some of the artistic practices that do not aim to celebrate the queer body in the same way that it can be celebrated in the safer, more protected spaces of the West.


Common approaches to archiving war include documenting personal experiences in diaries, which are not only textual but can also take the form of drawings, photos, repetitive actions, or abstract paintings. One such personal archive of the full-scale war is the diary of Hlib Yashchenko (he/she) who most often uses the nickname knyazkotyk, a Lviv-based artist and photographer. Since February 24, 2022, through the daily practice of drawing, Hlib has been trying to process her own horror as part of the collective horror of war. At the same time, she is exploring her identity: it was during the full-scale invasion that Hlib felt the need to articulate his gender identity. Although staying in Ukraine was Hlib’s deliberate decision, she says that it is now almost impossible to publicly disclose his queerness in Lviv. Moreover, nobody feels free to reflect on their various queer identities, because during the war such self-expression is not appropriate.
Yet even before the full-scale Russian invasion, the rights and visibility of LGBTQIA+ people in Ukraine had been a complex issue. For the Ukrainian artistic community, where many members hold left-wing or anarchist views and identify as queer, supporting LGBTQIA+ rights is logical; it is the common ground. This type of kinship offers a micro-space of psychological safety and freedom, providing inspiration and support for artists during the war. A chronicle of one such community is Olia Yeriemieieva’s project Our Family. The artist picked up an old Soviet photo album titled Our Family (Nasha Semjia, originally in Russian) from a flea market in Kyiv. In this album, Yeriemieieva included photos taken in 2022 and 2023 during walks through the bombed-out streets of Ukrainian cities, alongside shots from artist parties and residencies. These parties represent everything that was labelled “immoral” in Soviet ideology, which imposed strict normative limitations on notions of family, sexuality, homosexuality, and, ultimately, pornography in photography. The artist has conceived this series as a long-term project not to be limited to one album.




The situation in the Ukrainian art community however does not represent the broader societal processes of acceptance/rejection of queerness. The relative tolerance that residents of large cities show towards queer people, as well as the ability to legally hold public events like Pride parades, are often used to illustrate the commitment to European values (a concept problematized by queer and feminist initiatives in Ukraine) that Ukrainians embraced during the Revolution of Dignity (2013–2014). Jasbir K. Puar notes that states often instrumentalise “progressive” policies on queer people’s rights to enhance their own public image, while the state apparatus itself can remain repressive, and describes this process as “pinkwashing”[5]. In my opinion, the discourse of Ukrainian state initiatives during the war does not reach the cynicism of pinkwashing discussed by Puar. The reason for this, however, lies not in wise government policy, but rather in the opposite phenomenon – the government’s disregard for the needs of queer people and the rigid attitudes of politicians who have simply not discovered this strategy yet.
Many attempts to emphasise queer diversity are completely transparent, particularly during the war. In recent years, several Ukrainian Pride events, held under increased police protection or abroad, have been actively covered by Ukrainian and international media. The main threads of these reports have highlighted the contrast between democratic Ukraine and its homophobic neighbouring countries. In this context, Kyiv Pride 2024 took place on June 16th close to the Teatralna subway station and could only be held for about 20 minutes. The march was threatened by a massive group of ultra-right activists which caused the participants to flee. Many queer members of the Armed Forces were present in the parade, among the demonstrators, but they chose not to fight. Diplomats from the Embassy of the Netherlands in Ukraine, who joined the Pride, posted a selfie with rainbow attributes from Teatralna, and tagged “Marching for equality and victory” on the Embassy’s Facebook page. The Embassy immediately received hate comments from bots and alleged ultra-right groups with unknown sources of funding. Some of the commenters, though, were real people from Ukraine. The post has been kept on the page of the Embassy, but the comment section was closed due to hate speech, that’s why it’s impossible to evaluate the initial number of such comments now.




Projects that focus solely on the positive aspects of queer people’s lives need to be carefully considered. This approach can contribute to the understandable but potentially misleading desire to mythologise the democratic nature of our society, especially in time when we face the horrors of war and seek solidarity from the international community. The statistics regarding Ukrainians’ acceptance of queer people have been dynamic over the past decade, but here are some facts – the government has been reluctant to legalise same-sex unions, numerous acts of aggression by right-wing radicals have occurred against cultural projects, Nazi groups’ have violently disrupted Prides, and there have been dozens of documented hate crimes[1].
Meanwhile, beyond tiny private circles, artistic milieus, well-secured events or places (including the raves which gathered thousands of attendees, serving as platforms for self-expression and visibility), the majority of queers in Ukraine are compelled to resort to what the anthropologist and scholar of Ukrainian culture Emily Channel-Justice has defined as “strategic invisibility”[2]. In Ukraine, activist communities have worked hard to create the first opportunities for open discussions and performing queerness in art, public spaces, and media, ensuring they are neither hidden nor “overly” visible. Before the full-scale Russian invasion, the pavilion Dzherelo (Source) in Kyiv hosted a groundbreaking queer program, the first of its kind in an open, public space. During the series of public events titled The Fall of Binarity: Gender, the curatorial group of Dzherelo (Nikita Kadan, Alina Kleytman, Bogdana Ukraїna, and the curator of the public program, Lesia Kulchynska) explained the emergence of the programme: “Active minority is coming out from hiding, legally taking in its power tools”[3].
The full-scale war made the existence of such spaces impossible literally overnight, and similarly disrupted the possibility of imagining and designing future communities. Currently, the most optimistic vision for Ukraine involves post-war reconstruction. Solidarity and radical care for one another, which have emerged in Ukrainian society out of necessity for survival since the full-scale invasion, have become a new form of poetics. It begs the question, is there a place for queerness?


Following the disclosure of information concerning the sadistic sexual violence, rapes, tortures, and murders committed by Russian soldiers in Bucha, non-critical anti-militarist ideas which are at the core of many queer and feminist theories, such as Paul B. Preciado’s call “We don’t have to send weapons. We need to send peace delegations to Russia and Ukraine. We must peacefully occupy Kiev [sic!], Lviv, Mariupol, Kharkiv, Odessa [sic!]. We all have to go. Only millions of non-Ukrainian and unarmed corps can win this war”[8], seemed like a failed attempt to analyse the nature of violence, military invasion, and to accept at least the existence of the Other’s pain. By the time this article was being proofread, Preciado’s text “War is within Us” (May 22, 2022) had been removed from the media outlet Breaking Latest News. However, the impact of this article can still be easily traced in the comments of philosophers discussing the war in Ukraine.
Now, there are many war-torn wastelands where Ukraine’s innovative initiatives were beginning to sprout before 2022. The chronological casts of the war in artistic practices make apparent how delicate and vulnerable queer relationships are, highlighting their inherent need for safety and protection. In Ukraine, a conversation about oneself, a public reflection of one’s own queerness, or queering a community through artistic gestures and actions often seems inappropriate at a time when so many people struggle to meet their basic needs; coffins arrive daily from the frontline and men who are prohibited from leaving the country remain in the painful limbo of waiting to be called up and sent to the hell of the warzone. In the video Lost in Freedom (2022), the director and artist Anti Gonna wanders naked, extremely vulnerable and stripped of any social status, through the ruins in Kyiv, Bucha, Irpin, Hostomel, and Borodyanka. At times, her defenceless body turns into a hologram, as if disintegrating, unable to connect her past identity with the current state of the loss of everything[9].


The artistic language has radically transformed. My initial intention to write about queering death now seems inappropriate. How can one suggest queering attitudes towards death when even traditional funeral rituals are often impossible due to missing bodies? Moreover, the bodies of Ukrainians may remain in occupied areas or be literally held captive by the Russian army, which only rarely returns Ukrainians’ bodies during prisoner-of-war exchanges. There is too much grief to be fully processed. Boji’s performances, Jan Bačynskyi’s ironic utopias, Kateryna Lysovenko’s explorations of human and non-human love – once vibrant in Ukraine – have been forced in recent years to be most often presented beyond Ukraine’s borders. And though many artists are trying to bring their practices home, their narratives have changed significantly. The sharp irony, or dreams of harmony have shifted to the narratives of migration, trauma, healing, exploration of family memory and to commemoration. These artists are quite well-known in Ukraine and abroad, while my point here is to include some (yet) less visible practices.
Many researchers write that traditional gender roles become polarised during armed conflicts[1]. Masculinity comes down to the role of defender of the nation, including defending the “weak” women. Abroad, Ukrainian women are assigned the role of refugees. At best, according to this theory, women are “those who protect the family, national identity and culture”[4]. Under such circumstances, queer identities are being further marginalised. But have art, culture, and public life become hopelessly binary?

It is mostly men who are subject to mobilisation and can’t leave the country, who are finding themselves in a more precarious position. This inequality and new fragility is addressed by artists. For instance, the exhibition Meanwhile at the Khanenko’s, curated by Katia Libkind, emphasised the vulnerability of men. This gender polarization and reductiveness has become a disaster for trans* people who did not have enough time or were unable to change their legal documents for other reasons. In such cases, their rights and identities are ignored during the mobilisation process, and trans* people may be forced to serve in the army in accordance with the labels held by an enlistment office. The issue merits special attention, particularly in art, as it is currently one of the darkest aspects of the state’s normative gender policies. On the other hand, female gender roles in Ukraine are being forced to diversify, rendering the ‘’weak’’ woman perhaps the rarest one at the moment. Women serve in the army, occupy positions of combat medics, hold public office, volunteer, evacuate their own and other people’s children, adjust to living in foreign countries, as well as continue to fulfil their duties under the inhumane conditions of occupation or terror from the skies.
In a situation which makes utopias unimaginable, queer people are fighting against the “strategic invisibility,’’ described by Emily Channel-Justice. First of all, one means of doing this is by coming out with the message “We are here. We are defending the country, as well as working, volunteering, and engaging in cultural activities.”
In the spring of 2022, Rebel Queers – Angelik Ustymenko and Alex King – began working on the documentary series Queer Fighters of Ukraine. During the war, the neurodivergent and non-binary artist and filmmaker Angelik Ustymenko collected reflections and evidence from queer defenders to highlight various forms of queer resistance. In 2023, Ustymenko released the third part of the documentary. Unlike the queer Ukrainian soldiers who posed for Anton Shebetko in 2018, covering their faces due the reluctance to reveal their queerness in the army, the protagonists of Queer Fighters of Ukraine do not hide their identities. Mark, who was serving at the frontline when the third part of the documentary was filmed, recalls: “Once, in 2017, at a Pride parade, some burly journalists from Belarus approached us and said: ‘How long have you been defending your country in the ATO?’. With a subtext like ‘So what’s up, faggot?’ It was kind of offensive.” However, Angelik points out: “Life in the army does not allow people to reflect their queerness, and their brothers and sisters in arms сannot ask questions or display their attitudes. This issue is simply not discussed at war.”


In the summer of 2022, the increased visibility of queer defenders led many citizens to actively support a campaign for the legalisation of same-sex unions. This issue has become especially pressing as Ukraine is preparing to join the European Union. In Ukraine, same-sex partners do not have the right to inherit from each other, visit each other in the hospital, make medical decisions for an ill partner, or adopt children together, and the Constitution cannot be amended during martial law. Therefore, a law on “same-sex partnerships” was proposed. In the spring of 2023, a petition in favour of registered partnerships received 25,573 votes. This law would allow same-sax partners to visit each other and make decisions in emergency situations as well as grant them inheritance rights. These issues are of great urgency during the resistance to a military aggression. However, despite the government’s promises to pass the law, same-sex and opposite-sex civil unions have not yet been introduced in Ukraine.
The discussion around the Arch of Freedom of the Ukrainian People, in the centre of Kyiv, illustrates the complexity of attitudes towards identity, national memory, queerness, and the authorities’ ignorance of this existing complexity and its intersections. In 1981-1982, the Soviet government commissioned the colossal structure to commemorate the “reunification of Ukraine with Russia” (it was originally named the People’s Friendship Arch). In addition to the arch, the ensemble encompassed two groups of sculptures which, in compliance with the Soviet propaganda policies, glorified the colonisation of Ukraine by the Russian empire and the Soviet regime and the ‘‘brotherhood of nations”.’ The sculptures were dismantled in 2022 and 2024, but the 35-metre-high arch remained. Despite the renaming, the monument can still be interpreted as a sign of Russia’s colonial claims. More and more institutions are calling for the dismantling of the structure.



It is possible to rethink the role of the monument in public space. The gesture that can change the meaning of the arch consists of turning it into a huge rainbow permanently, a symbol of the queer community. The Kyiv City State Administration (KCSA) currently displays an unwillingness to “impose LGBTQ propaganda”. Even Anton Drobovych, the head of the Institute of National Memory, sees such a solution as an option, although his primary decision is to demolish the arch[10]. The rainbow lighting had been installed for many years before government representatives realized its association with the LGBTQIA+ community. In 2017, there was an awkward joint attempt by Eurovision and the Kyiv City State Administration to paint the arch as a rainbow. It was only through the critique from ultra-right groups that the connection between the LGBTQIA+ community and the massive rainbow in the city was finally “officially” established. The homophobic backlash prevailed in 2017, and the project to paint the arch was halted. It is true that the timing to paint the arch couldn’t have been worse. In 2014, the Russian invasion began and the sculptures depicting the “brotherhood” of Ukrainian and Russian workers, as well as the participants of the Pereyaslav Council remained in place, serving as a significant source of pain.
Before the start of the war, these sculptures coexisted with the rainbow lighting, which had been added in the 2000s and later removed. The government appeared unaware of the meanings and symbolism carried by all these elements. This moment of a huge rainbow shining over the glorified colonization of Ukraine captured a striking mix of unexamined meanings, misconceptions, and struggles, all converging in a single public space at the same time.
The Ukrainian writer Oksana Zabuzhko writes extensively and emphasizes the gendered and patriarchal character of the colonial relations between the Russian empire/Soviet regime and Ukraine. In her opinion, the Russian empire/Soviet regime’s colonial and patriarchal oppression has its roots not in race, which is a key notion in the criticism of European colonialism, but in language. Zabuzhko argues that the attitude to the Ukrainian language as a “wrong dialect of Russian” is part of the formula of colonial violence, which is “equally applicable to a white plantation owner who considers the skin of black workers as “dirty”, i.e. “soiled” white skin and to the patriarchal gaze […] a man as a “universal model” of the human, and a woman as, respectively, an “imperfect man”[6]. Zabuzhko’s observations fit well into the widespread system of images that represent colonial violence as rape – that of a body, a landscape, an ecosystem, a language. During my conversations with artists working in Ukrainian cities, I noticed that many of them perceive their everyday lives in a manner that resonates with this metaphor of patriarchal/colonial oppression.
Those who in peacetime explored the love of the body, sexuality, gender systems, and fluid relationships in communities, are now documenting trauma or trying to process it, as well as looking for ways to archive bodily experiences which have been transformed by the war and are now defined by existential threat rather than queerness. One example of this is Olia Yeriemieieva’s series We Accepted Death, in which the artist visualises the ritual of acceptance, performed almost daily by the residents of cities and towns under constant shelling. In terms of normativity, nobody in Ukraine is “normal” anymore. Those who are physically unharmed, in order to keep living under frequent rocket fire, in a country where no place is safe, have to go through the process of accepting the loss of limbs that may occur in a missile strike or chemical weapons attack, with the possibility of enduring prolonged pain as a debilitating condition, and living in a different, “abnormal” body.



This research started as a study of the Wartime Art Archive (on the invitation of its co-curator Halyna Hleba), initiated by the Ukrainian Museum of Contemporary Art. The first version of this text was published in Ukrainian in Krytyka in June 2024. The English version (January 2025) has been updated according to changes that have happened since the initial publishing, and includes a different introduction and significant editorial changes. When the Ukrainian edition of this article was first published, the artistic community had just learned of the death of queer artist, musician, and performer Artur Snitkus, who was serving at the front. His death was a profound shock, even as we face the loss of defenders daily. Many knew Artur as a person who was the heart of the party, and the fact that he was killed underscores very clearly that death brought by the invading regime comes not only after bodies, but for queerness, and for the very joy of being.
Maria Vtorushyna (they/them) is a curator, researcher and writer with a particular interest in notions of freedom, queer and feminist epistemologies, gender diversity, and the coloniality of gender. They were a researcher at the Centre for Gender and Diversity at Maastricht University, an editor-in-chief of Artslooker Magazine, and a curatorial fellow at Künstlerhaus Bethanien (Berlin). Currently working as an independent curator and critic, Maria led Kyiv Art Week as its director from 2016 to 2022.
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