BLAKYTNA TROJANDA | Блакитна троянда

Jan Bačynsjkyj | AtelierNormalno | Oksana Kazmina | Rebel Queers | Olexii Kuchanskii 
curators: Vlad(a), Taras Gembik 

For centuries, the Russian imperial war machine sought to erase the culture of Ukrainian people. On the morning of February 24, 2022, these efforts increased significantly. The full-scale invasion added to the precarity of marginalized groups, which experienced persecution and violence before wartime. Despite the harassment and additional forms of discrimination, the LGBTQIA+ community in Ukraine is actively resisting the aggressor. To show these forms of resistance and comprehend their specificities is the task of the exhibition and the accompanying program.

The war in Ukraine contributed to the reconfiguration of queer theory, a theory that often does not work considering the realities of the current invasion. It does not work because its main problem in a Ukrainian context is the inability to accept and understand this very context. Emerging primarily from the metropole, queer theory does not take into account the (post)colonial existence of present-day Ukrainian queerness. Therefore, we would like to answer the questions of who belongs to the LGBTQIA+ community in Ukraine today, and what a distinctly Ukrainian queer theory might look like.

The title of the exhibition is taken from the first Ukrainian psychological work by Lesya Ukrainka, which refers to the Ukrainian writer’s visit to a psychiatric hospital in Tworki near Warsaw. The heroines of the work concern themselves with “new gods” and problems tied to their selfhood (“what’s inside of me”), questions of “heredity” and “responsibility”. Lesya voices these “new” topics of discussion through the lips of the heroines, raising questions about the status of identity and the right to self-determination.