Posts By: Lesia Kulchynska

Necropolitics of the Image

By Lesia Kulchynska, May 27, 2025

“.. to photograph someone is a sublimated murder.” Susan Sontag Disfavourable View When Russia started its occupation of Donetsk in 2014 and established its proxy government there, one of the first things this new power did was seize the major Donetsk art center called Izolyatsia.  A group of armed men simply entered the territory of [...]

Gray Zone of Images

By Lesia Kulchynska, August 28, 2024

“There are rarely good reasons for showing us the images of mutilated victims” Harun Farocki[1]   “Those of you who, despite the flood of death images, choose not to bear witness but instead act as mere spectators, beware that you are passing through our bodies, walking over our bodies, and standing on our bodies,”[2] wrote Lebanese [...]

Radically Different Society: Ukrainian Art in the Light of Revolution, in the Shadow of War

By Lesia Kulchynska, August 11, 2023

This lecture was presented on October 22, 2022, in Paris as a part of the symposium “History of Contemporary Art in Ukraine: from resisting the System to Constructing a common future“, organized by the Kandinsky Library, MNAM/Centre Georges-Pompidou on the occasion of the donation of works by contemporary Ukrainian artists to the national collection of [...]

Dark Matter of Image

By Lesia Kulchynska, February 16, 2023

(Lecture, presented at Transmediale in Berlin on February 2, 2023) This text is a subjective reflection on my own relationships with the images of war in my home country, Ukraine. As these images now become the dominant part of my visual experience and I feel massively impacted by them, there is an urgent need for [...]

Violence is an Image: Weaponization of the Visuality During the War in Ukraine

By Lesia Kulchynska, October 26, 2022

Can an image be a weapon? By the word weapon I mean not the device that helps you win, but an instrument of violence — a device (in this case, a symbolic device) that can inflict harm and damage.  This question was invoked during the first months of the full-scale invasion when we (the consumers [...]