Women at War
Presented from January 12, 2023 through March 19, 2023
Curated by Monika Fabijanska
Women at War features works by leading contemporary women artists working in Ukraine, and provides context for the current war. Several works in the exhibition were made after February 24, 2022, when Russia began the full-scale invasion of Ukraine; others date from the eight years of war following the annexation of Crimea and the creation of separatist Donetsk and Luhansk “People's Republics” in Donbas in 2014.
War is central to history. History has been written (and painted) by men. This exhibition provides a platform for women narrators of history and also examines gendered perspectives of war. Many artists in this exhibition struggle with the notion of victimhood and pose the question in what way women have agency during war.
The exhibition is curated by Monika Fabijanska and produced by Fridman Gallery, New York, in collaboration with Voloshyn Gallery, Kyiv.
Praise for Women at War
The refusal of victimhood is the most pervasive idea uniting these works, even in images that deal directly with rape as a tool of war. This requires resistance not just to contemporary ideas and labels, but to narrative ideas and poetic images as old as civilization: that women are the vessels of wartime trauma and their bodies a canvas on which men write history with the lacerating quill of violence. Thus, Euripides in 415 B.C. in ‘The Trojan Women’: ‘And forth, lo, the women go,/The crown of War, the crown of Woe,/To bear the children of the foe...
Exhibit Programming
Wednesday, January 25, 2023 at 12 p.m
Conversation with artist Alevtina Kakhidze, who has served as the United Nations (UNDP) Tolerance Envoy in Ukraine
Zoom Recording is available here.
Wednesday, February 8, 2023 at 7 p.m.
Conversation with Dorothy Kosinski, Director Emerita, Phillips Collection and the Exhibition Curator Monika Fabijanska
Event took place in person.
Tuesday, February 28, 2023 at 2 p.m.
Screening of Letter to Turtledove by Dana Kavelina and a conversation with the artist
Zoom Recording is available here.
Wednesday, March 8, 2023 at 7 p.m.
Panel with Blair Ruble, a Distinguished Fellow at the Wilson Center, Marta Perez Garcia, a local artist, and Aneta Georgievska-Shine, an art historian at the University of Maryland, College Park, moderated by Sonya Michel, a professor emerita of history a
Recording of the event is available here.
Additional Links
The recordings of a curatorial walkthrough and four conversations with the exhibition artists moderated by curator Monika Fabijanska are available online.
You can find the press release here.
Exhibit catalogues are available for sale through the Fridman Gallery.