It's not only my personal beginning of war

26.02.2025.

Marking the third year since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine Pauls Stradiņš Medicine History Museum in collaboration with the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art invites you to a conversation It's not only my personal beginning of war with Ukrainian artist Olia Mykhailiuk - on 26 February at 18:00 at the Medicine History Museum.

In her talk Olia Mykhailiuk will focus not only on the war in Ukraine, which has been going on since 2022, but mainly on the events that preceded it and their impact afterwards, and will share photographs, video and music from her multimedia works dedicated to the Crimean Peninsula. 

26 February is the Day of Resistance to Occupation of Crimea. On this day in 2014, the Mejlis of the Crimean Tatar People organised a rally with 10 000 participants, in support of the unity of Crimea and Ukraine. The following day, masked Russian armed forces seized the Crimean parliament building in Simferopol and occupied the peninsula. The impact of these events on current global political, economic and environmental processes is clear. Crimea has become a military base and the pattern of its occupation has been projected onto other territories. 

Olia Mykhailiuk was in Crimea in March 2014 and witnessed the annexation with her own eyes. Since 2014, she has travelled many times to places as close as possible to the annexed Crimea to document the peninsula, collecting sounds, colours and textures on the border.  Still recently she was in Kherson, the Ukrainian city closest to Crimea, which is under constant enemy fire. How does this place look and sound like today? Is art possible under the threat of constant drone attacks? 

Since 2021, the artist has been working on an audio-visual project “No Man is an Island” about the south of Ukraine, Crimea, Kherson, Mariupol and Odessa. As a necessity to maintain the link between mainland Ukraine and the Crimean Peninsula, it is a co-creation of several artists and musicians, a journey to a place that is both close and unreachable, in which are united traditions and the contemporary, the artistic and the documentary, the insular and the continental.

“It is an attempt to bring it back, by using the means available. This imagined Crimea is assembled from the sound of grasses that grow between the mainland and the peninsular, the Crimean wind and echoes of traditional music recorded in Kyiv. All this is reminiscent of a dream. But this is precisely what Crimea is for many today,” the artist writes. 

In Riga, the artist is carrying out the continuation of the project “No Man is an Island. Three Seas”, which is linked to the Black, Azov and Baltic Seas.

Olia Mykhailiuk is an interdisciplinary artist living and working in Kyiv. In 2007, she teamed up with other like-minded people and founded ArtPole Agency to unite artists working in various fields—painters, musicians, performers, and writers. She continues to develop interaction between various art disciplines, particularly performance, music, literature, and video art. Since the start of the full-scale war in Ukraine in February 2022, she has been working as a volunteer in a humanitarian center in Kyiv, been going to war-torn Irpin, together with locals, to rebuild it by planting plants and documented stories. At the end of 2022, Olia Mykhailiuk’s work was part of the exhibition Decolonial Ecologies at the Riga Art Space, organised by the LCCA. 

Olia Mykhailiuk’s residency in Riga is supported by the Goethe-Institut and the Culture Moves Europe programme.

The talk is organised by the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art in collaboration with the Pauls Stradiņš Medicine History Museum.