I associate the view of the sea with early adolescence. I liked to be by the sea in late autumn, especially just before the sky grew dark, because it seemed threatening, because it was an all-encompassing sea, silencing my ignorance and my inability to be with myself and my feelings. It’s a kind of romance. And my sea remains the same. Meanwhile, looking at the sea which the Ukrainian artists Maria Matiashova and Dima Tolkachov displayed in the ‘Out of Touch’ exhibition organised by the mental health festival Ryšiai, I see it completely calm, but that’s just how I see it and feel it. As I prepare for the conversation, I understand that this will not be a conversation about art (or the sea), it will be a conversation about survival, about our different seas, and what is happening to them, in them, and beyond the horizon.
Emilija Vanagaitė: Can you explain your artwork Worrying Waves, which you created specifically for the exhibition ‘Out of Touch’ at the Ryšiai festival?
Maria Matiashova: This video is about the background anxiety which you live through when there’s a war in your country. And about how war can turn things you love into things that make you anxious.
Dima Tolkachov: The starting point for the work is a video of a sea view which Maria and I filmed in Odesa in April this year. It was our first visit to the port city since the beginning of the full-scale invasion. We walked along the coast and felt a dissonance. There, somewhere, beyond the turquoise waves and the blue horizon, there are Russian cruisers coming to launch another missile attack. That was when we got the idea to use absurdity as a tool to reveal the feeling of a threat, which you never see but which you’re always thinking about.
Worrying Waves
MM: The coastal landscape of Ukraine’s south has always been a place of strength and calm for me. But the war is redefining it, and it feels different, just like many other usual things, for instance, the blue sky, from which missiles can come at you at any moment, or the woods, where you can no longer go for a walk because of the mines.
DT: This section of the video isn’t just about the sea. Or to be more exact, it’s not about the sea at all. It’s a metaphor for the state you’re in when the enemy terrorises you with missile attacks every day.
MM: For me, it’s also about the state of obsessiveness, which, in my experience, often accompanies anxiety. Because sometimes what you can’t see is scarier than what’s in front of your eyes. And cyclical ruminations on potential danger are hard to stop.
In this video, we wanted to talk not only about anxiety but also about how we can work with it. This wish produced a video sequence with breathing exercises which I do to calm down.
DT: Breathing ‘into a boat’ is also an illustrative substitute. It refers to various therapeutic practices which can help Ukrainians keep their wits about them and give them a mental resource in a state of permanent exhaustion. It’s a bodily metaphor, a bit naive but very apparent, which is meant to show that you should take care of yourself even when there’s been a war in your country for almost two years.
EV: The premise of the Ryšiai festival is to talk about mental health in an open way, and to erase the stigma around it. What place, in the sense of mental health awareness, does Ukraine and its society hold?
MM: My life is rather closely interwoven with the subject of mental health. In 2011, I learned that I had obsessive-compulsive disorder. Since then, I’ve been learning, to some extent, to cope with anxiety. In my experience and my social bubble, I feel that the mental health awareness around me is rather high. And I can talk about my problems freely and without shame. But I assume that not all social circles are like that. So it is probably my privilege.
Nevertheless, for a few years now, in my view, there has been a steady trend for Ukrainians to go for therapy. Many people publicly share the mental struggles they go through. I believe it’s a good sign.
War is a time and a space where mental suffering affects everyone. So for Ukraine today, mental health and mental help are extremely important subjects.
DT: It seems to me that my mind is healthy; well, to the extent that it can keep healthy in an environment of constant tension. The all-encompassing feeling of anxiety developed long before 24 February. Half a year before that, we were already engulfed in a state of waiting for war to break out. The information space was filled with evidence that hundreds of thousands of Russian troops were gathering on Ukraine’s borders.
In February and March 2022, when Kyiv was surrounded and there were battles in the suburbs, I heard artillery fire outside my window and heard the sounds of fighter jets in the sky. Now Kyiv is no longer a frontline city, but the feeling of a background threat remains. Every day we hear sirens, the Russians regularly launch missile barrages and groups of kamikaze drones. Luckily, in the year and a half of the war, our air defences have become much better, but even pieces of an intercepted missile can do a lot of damage.
Irregular and brief stress can be useful. It galvanises you. But constantly living in a situation of danger destroys you. We don’t have the illusion that this war will end tomorrow. More and more people are realising that this is a long-haul situation for years to come.
You get used to everything. Things that seemed abnormal are now normal. And that, of course, is not normal. We will learn the consequences of cohabitating with danger only years from now. So in the future, I think, mental health problems will be some of the biggest challenges for Ukraine. And I’ve only described the situation for civilians here, without mentioning the problems soldiers will face when they return from the front.
Maria Matiashova. Photo: Nika Popova
EV: How, from your own experience and point of view, has war changed the way that young Ukrainians create art? Is it possible to run away, and create in topics not related to it?
MM: In the first period after the invasion, my and Dima’s art, and the art of many people around us, gained a more ‘poster’ and reactionary expression. It became a fast, loud, unequivocal, categorical, clear and comprehensible message. I think that’s natural: you try emotionally to turn it into a tool of resistance.
DT: Later, as a certain distance developed, we gradually returned to more thoughtful and complex statements. Our works no longer scream; instead, they capture observations, analyse them, and give space for interpretation.
MM: The war exposes: art is (always) political. The artist’s sense of responsibility becomes more acute. In this context, I believe, right now, ambiguous art, without any position, which completely shifts the responsibility for interpretation solely on to the audience, is becoming unnecessary, even impossible, among Ukrainian artists.
DT: It seems to me that any hint of ambiguity in Ukrainian art evaporated after Bucha. There was a realisation that you were living in a situation of threat not only to your identity but to your very existence. This change in feelings was aptly articulated by Svitlana Biedarieva: ‘The ambiguity is gone. [1]’ In her article, she describes the transition from postcolonial uncertainty to decolonial resistance.
MM: I feel that we Ukrainians all talk about the war in one way or another, even when we do not bring up the topic directly. In this sense, it is impossible to create outside the war. Because the war is a factor of total influence which affects you on many levels. When you touch on any of them, you automatically touch on the war.
DT: Of course, when you live amid war, you can try to escape it. But the war will catch up with you, even in escapism. This feeling was aptly described by Ivanna Kozachenko in her article for Solomiya Mag #2: ‘A simple picture of a flower made during the war will have an enormous semantic load.’ So when I see a dove hiding among leaves, it seems to me that those are not leaves but military camouflage.
Dima Tolkachov. Photo: Maria Matiashova
EV: How important, and in what ways, do you find art and the practice of it in times of war?
MM: War is a tectonic shift. So it inevitably entails a reconsideration of values: some things lose their importance, and sometimes even their meaning, while others, in contrast, gain a larger meaning. And the essence of the reconsideration, I believe, depends primarily on your own experience of living through war.
For me, art has always been a stick which I could, and loved to, use to dig inside myself. With the full-scale invasion, it has also become a way to make statements about the world, and an attempt to support the other. I think art facilitates reflection on the past not only for the artist but also for the audience, who can juxtapose their experience with the artwork. I would really like my art to be a source of support and something for others to lean on, a place for dialogue.
DT: Since February 2022, I’ve become much more productive in creativity. I felt as if every day might be my last. So I wanted to do as much as possible. Gradually, I also realised that art practices are a type of work that consumes me, in a good way. It’s a way to avoid ruminating on the flood of worrisome messages, and instead focus on making sense of the most important things.
You can experience Worrying Waves at the exhibition ‘Out of Touch’ at the Radvila Palace Museum of Art until 6 October.