Dana Kavelina

activism and protest in order to maintain distance from the ferocious reality at hand, thereby creating counternarratives to conventional forms of media representation. Kavelina deals with the battlegrounds and sites of atrocity per se, in the process conceiving of the soil there as a protagonist in its own right—one that is wounded and exploited as a resource yet still keeps the buried bodies straight and provides them with space. Since 2014, she has reflected upon the events of the military conflict following Russia’s invasion of the Donbass region through the lens of personal tragedy by employing archival footage as well as various forms of animation. Kavelina has also explored the relationship between historical monuments and memory, such as in cases where people no longer remember specific historical details due to being overburdened by tragic events. To this end, the artist has interacted physically with monuments as a way of hinting at their representative—or, indeed, misrepresentative—nature. Kavelina also addresses the lives of historically important individuals who were forced to endure bitter fates due to religion, general oppression, or political non-conformism. The artist’s native country of Ukraine has always served as the starting point for her observations, which so prominently recapitulate the political developments there. Concerning the number of attacks and killings over the years, which can hardly be fathomed, she states that “the war became a ghost, vaguely present but never completely absent.” W.S.