Rebels in Ukraine Cleansing Donetsk of ‘Perverted’ Art
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Version 0 of 1. Russian-backed separatists who seized control of a modern art space in the Ukrainian city of Donetsk last year have destroyed a monumental sculpture there, according to the exiled directors of the center, known as Izolyatsia, or ‘Isolation.’ Undated video posted online Wednesday by the Izolyatsia foundation from its new home in Kiev appeared to show rebels blowing up the chimney of its gallery in a converted factory in Donetsk. The chimney had been transformed into a giant lipstick tube in 2012 by a Cameroonian artist. The sculpture — called “Make Up!” — was intended to pay tribute to the women of the region, who helped rebuild it into an industrial powerhouse after World War II, according to its creator, Pascale Marthine Tayou. “I noticed that thanks to the courage of the Ukrainian women,” the artist explained, “Donetsk rose from the ashes after the war.” Referring to “symbols of love and hope,” he said: “Donetsk is not only a city of mines and metal. It is also an island of dreams, ready to share its hidden treasures.” After news of the work’s destruction spread, Ukrainian bloggers compared it to the rampages of Islamic State militants in Syria and Iraq. Since the center was seized by rebel forces on June 9, 2014, the Izolyatsia directors said this week, they have been “constantly informed of the consistent destruction of the artworks, which remained on the seized territory, and specifically, the destruction of site-specific installations.” Some of the destroyed work has been “sold as scrap metal or used in the construction of checkpoints in the city,” they said. Footage of the Donetsk art center in operation just before it was seized was posted online last June in a video report by the Ukrainian film collective Babylon ’13. In a video interview last year, Leonid Baranov, a rebel official whose unit occupied the gallery, disparaged the modern art there as “pornography,” in terms strikingly similar to those employed by the Nazi organizers of the “Degenerate Art” exhibition of 1937. “Considering what kind of art they have shown here, this center had to be seized,” Mr. Baranov told the journalists Timur Olevskiy and Orchan Dzemal. Displaying a seized book of art photographs that included sexually suggestive nudes, he observed, “This is not art and it cannot be art. These people are sick, and they have demonstrated this art to other sick people.” Mr. Baranov went on to say: “This art won’t exist on the territory of the Donetsk People’s Republic. Drug use and this kind of art will be punished here.” Calling the photographs pornography, Mr. Baranov said: “This has nothing to do with anything lofty or sublime, with anything Slavic. These people hate everything Slavic, everything Russian.” Warming to his theme, the militia leader suggested that such “perverted” art had kept the region’s young people from having healthy and productive sexual lives. “They’ve brainwashed our youth with this pornography. Our youth, instead of growing, marrying, getting children and getting jobs,” he said, “they degrade... here our population here hasn’t grown, but started dying out.” |