Ukraine ablaze

War Diary

Technique:

Painting, mixed media

Year:

2022

This series brings together numerous artworks where the artist invested all the pain and despair of the war, which continues to destroy all living things mercilessly. All of them are painted on extremely diverse surfaces. Mostly, these are the materials that the author found around her almost by chance. These include scraps of wallpaper, tree bark, rotten and not rotten boards, old cardboard, fireproof old burlap, etc. Sana would find all of it in her grandmother’s barn, which served as her studio for the first three months of a full-scale invasion.
With the escalation of the war, the artist's entire practice focused on the collective generational traumas, which, as it turned out, never remained in the past. Trying to live through the terrible events, Sana, in her images, addressed both the unbearable news of spring 2022 and historical crimes against Ukrainian men and women. Evacuation under heavy shelling, rescuing children and pets, subjects of motherhood, hunger, resistance, and destruction of nature are mythologised in Sana's works, becoming both eternal artistic stories and evidence of genocide.

Sana Shahmuradova-Tanska. War Diary