The song “Ukraine” by Taras Petrynenko was performed on stage during a party in 2022 as part of the Musical residency in Lviv, curated by Olha Marusyn.
The project involved IDPs and volunteers from the independent organisation Soma.majsternia, where they lived their shared experience of the full-scale war as a newly formed collective.
The work ironically reflects on the question of love for the homeland and refers to the artist’s personal experience of being forced to perform Ukrainian patriotic songs at school events while studying at college. The reenactment of the school performance is an attempt to re-appropriate this traumatic experience and free oneself from an objectifying view of oneself. The props, such as yellow and blue pom-poms made from garbage bags, and the overall choreography are recreated from real memories. The projection in the background is a real performance the artist participated in in 2016.

*In 2023, the artist repeated the performance in Poland at the 10th Young Trienniale (curated by Lia Dostlieva, Andrii Dostliev, and Stanisław Małecki). Before performing the song, the performer read a text in which she compared the compulsion she felt in her childhood experience and the compulsion to sing this song now in a European city due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.