I’m Lesia Khomenko, an artist from Kyiv, Ukraine, based in New York. I moved to the USA with my daughter in 2022 after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. When the full -scale war started on February 24, 2022 ,I was in Kyiv. Next day my family and I fled to Ivano-Frankivsk, a city in western Ukraine. In March 2022 I established an emergency art residency there in collaboration with Asortymentna Kimnata, a nonprofit art institution in Ivano-Frankivsk. We invited displaced artists and organized a common studio and space for discussions. We were building a network between artists and institutions when everything seemed to be collapsing. A few months later I moved to the US. I’m working with painting based on online war footage from Ukraine. I’m researching social media including personal blogs of soldiers, military experts, volunteers and civil witnesses and transforming their digital testimonies of the war into semi-abstract, semi-figurative paintings.

As an artist, I consider my practice of painting as the bridge between the raw footage from the frontline and the deconstruction of the nature of the violence. In my research I’m using the methodology of war crimes investigators by watching graphic content frame by frame with precise analysis that is not forensic but instead visual. I’m using different kinds of material such as drone footage, body cameras and weapon optics’ records. This variety of images allows me to build a dialogue between historical wars and recent battles. I am referencing social realism post-WW2 battle paintings and recent cyber war reality.Photography and video play key roles as sources for my paintings. I assume that photography has become another kind of weapon because of widespread cyber war. This shift in the role of photography leads me to rethink the role of representation in correlation to art and history.