Discussion participants: Miglė Bareikytė, Mykola Homanyuk, Natasha Klimenko, Lesia Kulchynska, Viktoriya Sereda

Screening of: Images and Objects: Russia’s War against Ukraine (video essay by Miglė Bareikytė and Natasha Klimenko, in collaboration with Mykola Homanyuk, Svitlana Matviyenko, Gintautas Mažeikis, Denys Shatalov, and Bohdan Shumylovych)

Performance by: Borys Kashapov

Moderated by Daniel de Zeeuw with an introduction by Oleksandra Moskalenko

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has destroyed lives, communities, and cities. From the beginning of this stage of the war, images of this destruction spread across various media platforms. Paintings, photographs, drone footage, TikTok videos, and Instagram posts have shaped how the war is experienced, represented, and archived. In this multidisciplinary volume, artists, scholars, and writers explore how art, media, infrastructures, and material culture respond to and contest the Russia-Ukraine War.

The book launch will feature a presentation of the volume, followed by a conversation with the editors (Miglė Bareikytė, Natasha Klimenko, and Viktoriya Sereda) and two of the book’s authors (Mykola Homanyuk and Lesia Kulchynska) on how different cultural and spatial forms—including social media, visual art, billboards, and infrastructure—interpret and shape the war and the narratives that envelop it.

Alongside the discussion, the event will include a screening of an experimental video essay directed by Bareikytė and Klimenko and made in collaboration with five contributors to the volume. The video essay functions as an extension of the book, allowing scholarly work to take on an alternate form, and presents the voices and materials of the authors in a visual and time-based medium. The event will be introduced by economist Oleksandra Moskalenko and moderated by media studies scholar Daniel de Zeeuw.

The book presentation will be followed by the reception and performance by the Ukrainian artist Borys Kashapov, Only for Men. In the performance, Kashapov reflects on his experience of displacement and nomadic existence caused by the war in his country by creating his paintings not on the canvas that should be exhibited, transported,  and stored, but directly on the nails of the people he meets, turning them into live nomadic art institutions that tour the nail exhibition wherever they go, discussing it with their friends or random interlocutors.

The title refers to the practices of gender exclusion and codification inherent to patriarchal society, dramatized by war.  With the discrimination stated by the title, the artist invites everyone who doesn't consider themselves a man to ignore it, just like any other discriminatory prohibition.

Participants:

Miglė Bareikytė holds the Chair of Digital Studies at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder), where she is a dual member of the Faculty of Social and Cultural Sciences and the European New School of Digital Studies (ENS). For many years she has been researching digitalisation processes, digital war sensing and civilian archiving, media and data practices, media geopolitics and algorithmic accountability with a special focus on Central and Eastern Europe. Since 2022, she has been researching media and data practices during Russia's war against Ukraine in cooperation with colleagues from the University of Siegen and the Centre for Urban History in Lviv. Since 2024, she has been the principal investigator of the War Sensing project, which is part of the CRC 1187 Media of Cooperation.

Mykola Homanyuk, sociologist, geographer and theatermaker, is an associate professor at Kherson State University.  He has held a Lane Kirkland Fellowship at Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin, a fellowship at the Indiana University-Ukraine Nonresidential Scholars Program, and a fellowship at the Petro Jacyk Non-Resident Scholars Program at the University of Toronto. Since 2022, he has been a Prisma Ukraïna: War, Migration, and Memory research group member at Forum Transregionale Studien. Mykola is the author of numerous articles on ethnic studies, mental mapping and toponymy, as well as memory and commemoration. He recently finished his book Monuments and Territory: War Memorials in Russian-Occupied Ukraine (with Mischa Gabowitsch), published by CEU Press. He runs the Kherson Theatre Lab as a theatermaker and directs documentary theatre productions. In 2018, he was awarded the ADAMI Media Prize for Cultural Diversity in Eastern Europe, and the Journalism Excellence Award by the Council of Europe in 2025.

Natasha Klimenko is a doctoral candidate at the Graduate School of Global Intellectual History held at Freie Universität Berlin and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Her PhD project looks at the entangled art histories of Soviet Uzbekistan in the interwar period, with a focus on modernist art, conceptual transfers, identity formation, and the role of institutions. She also researches historical and contemporary art, culture, and media in Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia.

Borys Kashapov is a Kyiv-born,  Amsterdam- based artist, a graduate of the Rodchenko School of Photography and Multimedia. Kashapov was a member of the REP Group, the Penoplast dream-band, The Gay Carousel collective. Initiator of many self-organising projects and alter-institutional artistic practices. Works with video, performance. Through his works he explores power relations in art, and political aspects of the form.

Lesia Kulchynska is a curator and researcher in media and visual studies, currently based in Amsterdam.  Her work examines visual cultures of violence, media infrastructures, and the politics of art, with a particular focus on Ukraine and the Russo–Ukrainian War. She has been teaching courses on Media and Communication Studies at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, Kyiv Academy of Media Arts, and John Cabot University (Rome). Her recent research investigates networked visuality, violent responses to art, and the convergence of media infrastructures and infrastructures of violence in contexts of war and occupation. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam.

Oleksandra Moskalenko - Doctor of Sciences (Economics), Professor of the Department of Economic Theoryat the Kyiv National Economic University named after Vadym Hetman. Currently Duisenberg Fellow, 2025-2026 (NIAS, the Netherlands). She was also a Visiting Professor at the Centre for Macroeconomics, CARA Fellow, the Department of Economics at the London School of Economics and Political Science (the UK)

Viktoriya Sereda serves as Head Coordinator of the Virtual Ukraine Institute for Advanced Study (VUIAS) at the.Wissenschaftskolleg zu.Berlin and is a Professor of Sociology at the Kyiv School of Economics. She is also a Senior Advisor to the "War, Migration, and Memory" project at Forum Transregionale Studien and an Associate with the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University. Previously, Dr. Sereda was a visiting lecturer at the University of Basel and taught at Central European University's Invisible University for Ukraine program. Her research centers on migration, memory, and identity in Ukraine. She has held faculty positions at the Ukrainian Catholic University and Ivan Franko Lviv National University, where she taught sociology.