The Boryviter exhibition at the Kyiv National Center Ukrainian House, dedicated to Alla Horska, a Ukrainian artist, dissident, public figure, and human rights activist of the 1960s, has ended. The exhibition ran for six weeks, from March 14 to April 28, and attracted over 51,000 visitors, according to Olha Viyeru, the director of the Ukrainian House.
She later reflected on the event: “While this project may have reached its conclusion, Alla Horska’s journey, spanning from the 1960s to the present, has proven to be timeless. The exhibition struck a chord and resonated profoundly. From the outset, we anticipated interest in the project, but the magnitude of engagement surpassed even our expectations as organizers. It emerged as the most visited and influential endeavour in recent memory, which held particular significance given that over half of our attendees were either unfamiliar with Alla Horska or knew her solely as a name from the sixties. It was crucial for us to portray Horska not as a mere victim but as a symbol of freedom, resilience, and a relentless pursuit of justice and truth. Our aim was to illuminate her essence in its entirety, and every aspect of the exhibition and project planning was dedicated to this principle.”
Symbolically, it is significant that the exhibition is named in honour of Alla Horska’s mosaic panel, created in 1967 as a decorative element for the “Ukraine” restaurant in Mariupol. After Russia’s full-scale invasion on February 24, 2022, a significant part of the restaurant building was destroyed, and the fate of her work remains unknown. Furthermore, the projects featured at Boryviter go beyond merely recounting a history of losses, destruction, censorship, bans, and unrealised ideas. Essentially, they embody a narrative of a strong individual’s struggle against a powerful empire. Despite the organisers’ intentions, a palpable motif of sacrifice persists, reminiscent of the ethos of the Ukrainian dissident movement.
In a post-colonial context, the story of Alla Horska’s art is a painful one of lost subjectivity. It is a narrative that focuses on “how they did it” rather than “how we did it.”
At the exhibition, Horska’s sketches and photos were showcased. These works were originally from the Luhansk and Donetsk regions, now occupied by Russian forces. With the occupiers’ relentless desire to eradicate everything that’s Ukrainian, these works are undoubtedly at risk of being destroyed. However, despite the circumstances, enthusiasts and custodians of Ukrainian culture strive to preserve Alla Horska’s art for future generations. They have even created an online game and an interactive novel about her life and creativity.
Horska’s biography is carefully documented at the exhibition, and what stands out most, of course, is the persecution she faced from the security services. As history recalls, following her involvement, alongside other representatives of the Ukrainian intelligentsia, in uncovering burial sites of those executed by the NKVD in Bykivnia, Lukyanivske, and Vasylkiv cemeteries during 1962-1963, the KGB subjected her to round-the-clock surveillance. This surveillance heightened after she joined 139 figures from science and culture in signing a protest letter to the leaders of the USSR in 1968, condemning the unlawful arrests and secret trials of dissidents. These events culminated in her brutal murder in 1970, strongly suspected to be orchestrated by the KGB, though this remains unproven to this day. Within the exhibition, a dedicated hall showcases the surviving documents from this investigation.
One of the most tragic episodes of her art life, highlighted at Boryviter, occurred in 1964, when she, in collaboration with artists Panas Zalyvaha, Liudmyla Semykina, Halyna Sevruk, and Halyna Zubchenko, created the stained glass ‘Shevchenko. Mother’ in the Red Building of Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv. On the day of its opening, the university administration destroyed it at the direction of the Soviet Communist Party leadership because the stained glass was deemed ideologically incorrect and inconsistent with the principles of Soviet art.
The authors were accused of being openly hostile towards the Soviet state in portraying the image of a poor Ukrainian girl who sadly sought refuge with Shevchenko instead of rejoicing at the ‘victorious achievements’ of the Soviet Union.
Parts of the stained glass were even thrown into the grate. Moreover, the choice of quote from Shevchenko (“I will exalt the small, those silent slaves, I will put a word on guard near them!”) also seemed quite ambiguous to many party critics. Shortly after this state-sanctioned act of vandalism, Horska and Semykina were expelled from the Artists’ Union; although they were reinstated after a year, their rights and opportunities to find work were restricted.
In my view, here is one of Alla Horska’s quotes from 1969, featured at the Boryviter exhibition, which encapsulates the despair felt by Ukrainian artists in a totalitarian state that despises them solely for being Ukrainian and holding their own opinions.
“I am deprived of authorship because: ‘if you repent, we’ll give you authorship.’ I can work, but I cannot bear my own name. I am transitioning to illegal work. ‘Long live the underground in monumental art.’ If it were about us, but we are puppets in the struggle of certain groups. They want – they will take away the name, they want – they will twist the head, they want – they will pardon. Everything depends on what is beneficial for the assertion of their own group, and our life is just a trifle, not worth attention. You get tired as long as the soul does not turn grey.”
