Dzienniki Kijowskie

The Kyiv Diary constitutes Vlada Ralko’s reaction to the wave of protests that swept the cities of Ukraine in late 2013 and 2014. The Ukrainians came out in opposition to the refusal of the then president, Viktor Yanukovych, to sign the pending association agreement with the European Union. The centre of the Euromaidan events was the Independence Square in Kyiv. The energetic demonstrations were quashed by special units of the militia and torpedoed by pro-Russian parties. After those protests, Russia launched hybrid attacks on Ukraine, which in 2022 turned into an all-out military invasion.
 
The Kyiv Diary, a cycle of a few hundred drawings referring to the events in the Independence Square, are not easy to classify; the critics have described them as an “intimate diary”, but this formula does not suffice to define their multi-layered nature. These hastily jotted down records of anxiety and terror are indeed Ralko’s private vision; but it is a vision rooted in the large archive of European images of war and in the imaginarium of Ukrainian folklore. Looking through the pages of the Diary, we see women wearing traditional garlands or shawls, a St. Sebastian shot through with ammo, and animals that accompany people (including a bear, the figure of a Russian). We recognise Mamay the Cossack, a legendary hero, and the protagonists of Taras Shevchenko’s poems. Grimacing faces, axes embedded in pedestals of monuments, quartered bodies; this is how Ralko externalises her own perception of the conflict. Yet it is also a visual treatise on human attitudes, gestures and emotions.
 
Critics who comment on Ralko’s works point out that their timeless character springs from the symbolic nature of her motifs, her application of archetypes drawn from the Ukrainian tradition, and her confident use of metaphors. Yet the language employed by Ralko draws from an assortment of the means of expression which artists have many times used to speak about war, pain and iniquity. Some motifs found in her drawings are close to those used by Frieda Kahlo; her colour, line and characterisation of figures refer to the traditions of Expressionism and New Objectivity. Ralko’s visions are universal as much as they are regional, and her paramount principle of deforming and brutalizing the image is a intelligible tool with which to visualise the evil.