This March, the Nanovic Institute for European Studies hosted the 2025 Ukrainian Studies Conference titled “Revolutions of Hope: Resilience and Recovery in Ukraine.” The conference brought together scholars from across disciplines and the world to reflect on hope as a positive, reconstructive, preserving, and persevering force in the context of Ukraine’s ongoing war with Russia. Panels covered topics related to faith, culture, literature, history, daily lived experience, and art. The panel on art titled “Conflict and Creation: Art as a Force for Hope in Wartime Ukraine” and chaired by Tetyana Shlikhar featured papers from Oksana Ivantsiv, Lesia Maruschak, Alina Mozolevska, and Yohanan Petrov-Shtern. The panel examined art as a form of voice, giving people a space to narrate and process their lived experiences, share stories from wartime Ukraine, challenge propaganda, voice their own narratives, and hope for a brighter future.
Oksana Ivantsiv, a Fulbright scholar pursuing a Master of Global Affairs at the Keough School of Global Affairs, examined the place of hope to combat catastrophic thinking in her paper “Is There Hope? How Ukrainian Issue-Based Documentaries Contribute to Documenting War Crimes, Cultural Diplomacy and Peacebuilding.” In her talk, she invited the audience to imagine their “catastrophic scenarios,” sharing that hers is living under Russian occupation in Ukraine and the violence that would come with such a fate. She then introduced her documentary “Woman Occupied,” which shares the story of women from Germany, Ukraine, and Kosovo who had suffered from conflict-related sexual violence. The documentary, however, does not focus on the crimes committed against the women, but on the women’s “journey to justice,” on a hope for the future. Rape becomes a metaphor for occupation. The women suffered as Ukraine itself has suffered. Ivantsiv then discussed a second documentary about the impacts of environmental catastrophe in Ukraine, noting that the film documents environmental crimes and became a motivator for change to preserve the planet for future generations. She concluded with the idea of hope as a rope, saying, “It's something that could hold us even in our catastrophic scenarios, if they happen, and it's the rope that connects us so that we would not be alone in our own catastrophic scenarios.”
Lesia Maruschak, artist and founder of the VYDNO Collective and research affiliate at the University of Saskatchewan, spoke about the power of art to record and give voice in her paper “Memory as Resistance: Bearing Witness.” Through her art, she seeks to give voice to the voiceless, make visible the invisible, and bear witness to atrocities of the past and present in order to find the strength to act in resistance. Her installation “Homes of Our Children” turned Canadian prairies into a sacred space memorializing the children lost to the Holodomor, a famine which took place in Ukraine in the 1930s, and those displaced in modern Ukraine. Her “Project Maria” gives voice to the 4 million victims of the Holodomor in layered and multimodal ways. One piece, called “Volitha,” involves layering hundreds of pages of antique prayer books. In her layering of materials and narratives, Maruschak creates immersive, experiential art exhibits that the viewer can step into so that they too may bear witness and give voice: “I deliberately avoid a singular, authoritative narrative. Instead, I offer multiple channels of discovery, open-ended encounters; reviewers become participants.”
Alina Mozolevska, associate professor in the Faculty of Philology at Petro Mohyla Black Sea National University, reflected on the role of hope in art on social media in her paper “Resilience and Hope in Instagram Wartime Artivism.” As part of a research group, she has been collecting data since 2022 on testimony and witnessing in online spaces, including over 1000 images from 50 Instagram art accounts. Her research shows how online spaces have become an additional battleground for Ukraine, both as a space to voice resistance towards Russian occupation and to express hope. She gave examples of images which show both, noting the motif of the sunflower appearing in art after the well-known story of women from Henichesk telling soldiers from Russia to put sunflower seeds in their pockets as an act of resistance. She also gave examples of art showing unity and collaboration with “visualizations of Ukrainian soldiers and civilians who work together to resist the enemy.” In addition to a physical war, she noted, there is now an ongoing digital war. For Mozolevska, social media holds power as it “shapes our perceptions of the war and how they make us remember something or forget something and actually create the viewer’s image and perception of world developments.”
Yohannan Petrovsky-Shtern, Crown Professor of Jewish Studies and professor of history at Northwestern University, spoke about artists mobilizing in Ukraine to create public art that uses traditional methods in new ways to respond to the war. He reflected on how art became a form of resistance after the war began in 2022 and how people from all walks of life turned to art to express national identity and process the war in what he terms “mass artistic mobilization.” He drew parallels to the Ukrainian avant-garde movement of the 1910s and 20s and observed how creating arts gives people time to process what is going on day to day in Ukraine and, thanks to social media, also serves as an immediate response. Artists work with a variety of materials and genres, including glass, paper cutting, murals, collages, computer graphics, posters, site-specific installations, and more, as public responses to process the war, unify the Ukrainian people, and look towards the future. He noted that art becomes hope as a medium of unity and self-expression: “If we read these artworks as a text, they will tell us that we as artists are unifying the nation, politically, linguistically, and socially. We can bemoan our losses, but we can also laugh at our wounds. It becomes very much a part of Ukrainian self-exploration and Ukrainian self-image.”
As the four panelists show, art for Ukraine becomes a lifeline and a place for hope in a time of war and crisis. It is a place for the processing of violence and trauma. It’s a place for memory and the forming of a national identity. Art gives voice, mobilizes, and unites Ukraine in many forms of resistance. It looks backward and reflects on the wrongs that have been done, processes the complexities of the present, and looks forward with hope of a brighter future.