You're reading: Art in exile: Donetsk art center starts new life in Kyiv

Izolyatsia, an arts fund that once based in Donetsk, has started a new life in Kyiv -- another relocation forced by Russia's war against Ukraine.

Last summer, Kremlin-backed fighters seized the former insulation factory in Donetsk where the art center been located for four years. The separatists destroyed works that did not fit with their ideology and converted art objects to scrap metal. 

From Jan. 17 until Feb. 6, Izolyatsia is holding its first exhibition in Kyiv after fleeing.

Entitled “Revision,” the the exhibition includes works of Belarusian artists group, created in 2004. It is a part of collection that they were able to take from Donetsk. More of the saved art objects can be seen in the “Collection” section on the website of Izolyatsia.

“It is those works that we were allowed to take out from the occupied territory, about 1/3 of what we had. These are mainly paintings and photographs – something that could be easily transferred and loaded into the car,” Alesya Bolot, representative of Izolyatsia, said. 

But large works remain in Donetsk. Among them – a project of the French artist Daniel Buren, consisting of 124 metal grids that were used for storage and transportation of mineral wool at the factory.

“We certainly do not know what happened to those works, but most of them are made of metal, and we know that the metal components of the plant have been cut out and converted to scrap,” Bolot says.

During the invasion on June 9, separatist Minister for Social Policy Roman Lyagin  promised that the artworks would not be damaged. But the next day, the Izolyatsia factory was looted, property vandalized and equipment taken. The separatists didn’t like Izolatsia from the beginning of the conflict in April.

“In 2013 their representatives, under the leadership of one of the deputy of one of the Donetsk district executive committees, disrupted the event, which was hosted on our territory in conjunction with the U.S. Embassy,” Bolot says.

The educational event “TechCamp Donetsk 2.0” was supposed to help representatives of various Ukrainian nongovernmental institutions in using new media effectively. But a mob of around 100 people broke into the event and forced its early cancellation.

Today Izolyatsia is situated in a Kyiv shipyard. 

“There we were based at the former factory for the production of insulation materials, worked with space, with the history of the plant and the city. Industrial context is very close to us and we love it. Arriving to Kyiv, we visited a lot of spaces, stayed for a month at the VDNH (Expocenter of Ukraine), but eventually found a place in the industrial zone at the Podil. We can see pipes, valves, manufacturers from our windows. This kind of view has always inspired us,” Bolot says.

The organization doesn’t know how long it will stay in Kyiv. It’s already presented internationally in December, when it exhibited “Culture and Conflict: Izolyatsia in Exile” in Paris. The exhibition included interviews with blogger Dmitry Potekhin and artist Sergei Zakharov, both arrested and detained by separatists.

Zakharov’s street art installations in Donetsk offered parodies of separatist leaders, such as a “House of Cards” creation depicting separatists and Russian President Vladimir Putin. The message: the separatists exist only because of the Russian leader’s patronage.  

Sergei Zakharov showed in Paris a performance the ‘House of Cards’. Each outsized card depicted a character from the DPR. An additional card introduced Vladimir Putin. The expressed idea that the self-proclaimed ‘republics’ of the Donbas only existed by virtue of the Russian leader’s patronage was played out as the ‘Putin’ card was kicked away.

The exhibition aroused interest among  Ukrainian and international media. After that, Izolyatsia received several offers from foreign cultural institutions to make a similar exhibition in New York and Berlin. At the moment Izolyatsia’s founders are working on a project called IZONE. It includes a digital production laboratory IZOLAB, the online edition IZIN, exhibition space and space for lectures and master classes.

Kyiv Post staff writer Victoria Petrenko can be reached at [email protected].