Book Launch: Art in Ukraine Between Identity Construction and Anti-Colonial Resistance. Edited by Svitlana Biedarieva

This edited volume traces the development of art practices in Ukraine from the 2004 Orange Revolution, through the 2013–2014 Revolution of Dignity, to the ongoing Russian war of aggression.

Contributors explore how transformations of identity, the emergence of participatory democracy, relevant changes to cultural institutions, and the realization of the necessity of decolonial release have influenced the focus and themes of contemporary art practices in Ukraine. The chapters analyze such important topics as the postcolonial retrieval of the past, the deconstruction of post-Soviet visualities, representations of violence and atrocities in the ongoing Russian war against Ukraine, and the notion of art as a mechanism of civic resistance and identity-building.

The book will be of interest to scholars of art history, Eastern European studies, cultural studies, decolonial studies, and postcolonial studies.

Svitlana Biedarieva is an art historian, artist, and curator. She is the author of the book Ambicoloniality and War: The Ukrainian-Russian Case (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025), the editor of Art in Ukraine Between Identity Construction and Anti-Colonial Resistance (Routledge, 2024) and Contemporary Ukrainian and Baltic Art: Political and Social Perspectives, 1991-2021 (ibidem Press, 2021), and the co-editor of At the Front Line. Ukrainian Art, 2013-2019 (Editorial 17, 2020). She has published texts in leading academic journals and media outlets, such as October, Daedalus: Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Financial Times, and The Art Newspaper. She holds a PhD in History of Art from the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London.

Moderator: Dr. Vitaly Chernetsky,

President of the Shevchenko Scientific Society