Escape from Empire: Contemporary Female Artists from Ukraine and the Problem of Identity

Abstract

Relevance. The article explores how the question of individual and collective identity shapes the reception of contemporary Ukrainian art in the global field. The purpose of this article is to analyze the work of Ukrainian female artists based on the problem of identification and identity, as well as the problematiza­tion of the possibility of “being Ukrainian” or “being from Ukraine” within the framework of the postcolonial situation and decolonial analysis, applying the con­cepts of hybridity and borderland and mimicry. Methods. The study shows how the imperial infrastructure of the USSR directed professional biographies from the Ukrainian SSR to Moscow, turning Ukraine into a “province” and complicating artists’ self-identification within international discourse. Drawing on interviews, exhibition histories, and museum politics, the article traces ambivalent labeling regimes-“Soviet,” “Russian,” “Ukrainian,” “ex-Soviet” – and their impact on canon formation. Novelty. Hybridity is read not as a loss of belonging but as an operative category revealing local sources of subjectivity. In this sense, Boris Mikhailov’s Kharkiv and Yurii Leiderman’s Odesa appear as strong urban loci, where com­munity, memory, and language generate alternative axes of identification beyond the imperial center. Conversely, the strategies of Ilya and Emilia Kabakov and Igor and Svetlana Kopystiansky illustrate two modes of “escape from empire”: tran­scendence through a cosmopolitan utopia of art and assimilation within Western institutional landscapes, both of which complicate national attribution. Conclu­sion. The article argues that the question “who is who?” cannot be reduced to na­tional or passport identity; identity here is a process of identification that unfolds through choices of institutions, networks, themes, and places of articulation. In wartime, this dynamic opens a “window of opportunity” to reposition Ukrainian artists within the global canon –through decolonial research, the reattribution of museum collections, and renewed attention to local histories that provide a basis for self-identification and recognition.