Frankly... visual  Other's Pictures

All motifs feel strange these days. So this month, instead of reaching for a pen herself, Susi Bumms looks at pictures by some Ukrainian artists who are trying to process their pain and speechlessness.

One motif I always draw when no others occur to me is the following: a green ground, blue sky and a cloud. I have lots of these pictures. But even these feel strange right now, even this motif remains unfinished at the moment.

Pictures are important, and some pictures are more important than others.

Zhenya Oliinyk

Zhenya Oliinyk is an illustrator based in Kyiv. She draws a picture of herself at her desk with bombs flying through an open window beside her. “I'm displaced from my desk,” she writes in the caption, “it's too far to run to a hallway where I can hide – so I come to work to the dining room. It feels like 23% safer.” )
 

This image, too – so much pain, you’d need more than one brain to process it.
   

Anna Perepechai

Anna Perepechai is a photographer who is active in the Ukrainian community in Leipzig. In her Nostalgia series in 2017, she portrayed Eastern European shops and shopkeepers in Thuringia and decried the way they – and she herself – are often lumped together as “Russians”. This is a label born of prejudice and ignorance that local Germans indiscriminately apply to all things “in some way post-Soviet”.
Perepechai is now selling prints of those portraits and donating the proceeds to help Ukraine. The photos can be viewed on Instagram:
   

Jenya Polosina

Jenya Polosina has come up with her own take on Instagram's “sensitive content” warning. This depiction entails a horror in itself. She adds her own words to the warning: “This photo may contain graphic images from suburbs near Kyiv. Be careful, after these photos it can be difficult to keep saying ‘just peace to all.’”.
   
Thank you for your pictures!
   

May 2022