Artists Against War: The Visual Language of War. An Interview with Mykhailo Skop

Svidomi in collaboration with Artists Against War, an online gallery of posters created to support Ukraine after the Russian full-scale invasion, tell the stories of the artists who help Ukraine by means of art.  Read an interview with the artist Mykhailo Skop.

— What did you do before February 24? 

— I am an artist, art historian, and art director of Hiatus Games, a board game company. Before the full-scale war, my research activity was focused on the issues of Ukrainian identity, memory, and myth. I am interested in the way signs work, how you can interact with them, and how people identify themselves. Now, I am working on my PhD degree. As part of my thesis research, I am studying sacred plastic arts: monuments, sculptures, crosses, and other sacred objects in urban space. Also, I am studying how sacred spaces are arranged and filled with meaning, and how historical events are perpetuated. One of the key questions for me is “What is memory?”. My research and my creative works are devoted to the way a person memorizes something, and how a person reproduces these memories. From the concept of memory, the concept of myth and identity is derived. 

— What format did you work in? 

— First of all, it is underground art — as a matter of fact, I draw on abandoned buildings. Hereby, I work with how a person can perceive a changed space — when there appear the signs that shouldn’t be there. I also work with easel graphic arts: these are hand-drawn graphic arts that I draw on paper with egg tempera or Indian ink. It is no longer about space, but about a random play with signs and the creation of a certain image that does not have a certain meaning and is perceived by the audience in different ways. Yet another area of my activity is multimedia installations — very soon you will have an opportunity to see my work on the formation of a new identity and a new myth. As an illustrator, I create war posters.

Before the full-scale invasion, I was studying the society and myself, observing how the signs and certain narratives work.

We exist now, and we are not a product of something very ancient. We are an independent nation with its own past, but the past is the past. Our generation accomplishes new feats, and they are at times more successful and large-scale than those of our ancestors. Those signs and images that are produced by us now will be remembered and reproduced by our descendants in the same way as we remember the Cossacks and the insurgents. One of the important tasks is to manifest this identity in artworks.

A lot of illustrators who work on the global market face the problem of how to represent Ukraine and draw attention to the events happening here. The world will no longer be interested in another example of Russian atrocities. We will liberate Kherson and Mariupol, we will see thousands of killed and tortured people, but we will no longer be able to draw the world’s attention to it. The world has already seen it after Bucha was deoccupied. You can draw a dove of peace being shot, but this image will not speak of Ukraine. You can draw the Ukrainian flag, it will be recognizable, but you will not show the identity by doing that. You can draw a woman wearing Ukrainian national outfit being tortured by a Russian soldier against the background of a burnt village with peasant huts. But in this case, say, a Frenchman will think that we live in the 19th century. 

One of the key tasks which I define is to push aside the old stereotypes and understand the new ones, because it is us who are forming them. It is important to evoke empathy. For instance, if a person lives in Florida and is being told that somewhere far away, across the ocean, an absolute massacre (“extermination, mass murder”) is taking place, you need to convince this person that this fact should concern them. On the one hand, you can say that “this war will affect you too.” But in 99% of cases, they will not believe in it. Even if you appeal to the nuclear war, they will say “OK, fire the guns as you wish, figure it out yourselves, give away that Ukraine, but keep the nukes to yourselves.” This is a natural reaction of any person to threats — they think that if we say this, then we try to threat them, because it is not the Russians who say this, they say that there are Ukrainians here who must be “denazified”. This is a rather dangerous message.

In any case, every nation has its own peculiarities, according to which a certain set of images and messages should be formed. For example, Germans usually perceive everything straightforwardly and want facts, they cannot look at the horrors of war. The Poles are very close to us in terms of geography and mentality, so they understand both metaphors and real threats at once. You often have to explain Americans how close the war is and how much it affects them.

Balancing between showing our identity, on the one hand, and showing that we are the same, on the other hand, is a problem that the Ukrainian nation is successfully solving by forming its own identity. Ukraine has made a statement that we are in the world, but now we need to define who we are in this arena. 

— The beginning of the full-scale war, what was it like for you?

— I was one of those who believed that Russia would not go further than the east of Ukraine and Crimea. I thought that this sabre-rattling was just to raise the stakes, because there is no point in starting terrible bloodshed. I don't know to what extent I really believed in it, but I tried to convince myself. 

I live in Lviv. My girlfriend and I woke up at 6 o’clock in the morning because her mother called her. The first day of the invasion was in a fog, it is difficult for me even to recall it now. 

— What did creativity mean to you in the early days of the invasion? 

— The news were all over the place, and we were constantly refreshing the feed. The very next day I realized that I needed to do something. I created three artworks — it was a kind of therapy, this way I could relief the pain for a while. I saw a lot of feedback and realized that people needed this. In addition to the news, people need reflection and images. I remembered that I used to study signs and images, that is why I can work with what I know, what I want, and what others really need. People from other countries needed these images to understand what was going on. Images are things that, without using a lot of words, can convey meaning, and speak about what it is and why it is important. Also, images that are properly made have an eye-catching effect — they attract attention. 

— What symbols and signs can already be distinguished in this ongoing war? 

— Most of them are rather short-lived and are derived from current memes. They get fixed in our imagination, but the period when memes are recognizable is short. However, some of them can last longer. For instance, a meme about a woman from Henichesk who told Russians to put sunflower seeds in their pockets grew into a symbol of sunflower. Watermelons were another symbol. Now this trend has subsided a little, because summer is over, and watermelon is a seasonal berry. The sign of the white cross, which became one of the symbols of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and has a long tradition dating back to the Cossacks, was also popular for a short period of time. Even those signs that we don’t take seriously, such as a Schweinkarausche or swinedogs, get embedded in our identity, in one way or another. We will remember the ceramic rooster figurine on the wall. A lot of symbols are associated with weapons — Bayraktars, Javelins, Neptunes.

The Ghost of Kyiv was, in a certain sense, a synthetic myth that came to being in the first days of the invasion. This is an example of quick mythologizing, and an image that is almost completely independent of its real counterpart. When this image appeared, it was important for me that it did not turn out to be a specific man or woman. Then the structure of the myth would be broken, and that would spoil the magic. As it turned out, the Ghost of Kyiv is a collective image of the pilots who protected our skies. And this, in my opinion, promotes the existence of the image, because it is, by default, not connected to someone specific.

What we believe in has great power. With our collective faith that drives us to do the impossible on our own, we are creating a miracle that is more real than what actually could be: we could only hold for three days, but we have done the unthinkable. Therefore, the miracle of the Ghost of Kyiv is an iconic example of this unthinkable. It is a symbol that represents the miracle of many heroes. 

— How did people respond to your work? In particular, were there responses or proposals from abroad?

— For my suffering heart, the most pleasant responses were from Russians (laughing). That is why I don’t block those people who are raging in the comments. As for people from other countries, there were numerous exhibitions in Europe, Asia, South America, and the United States. I try to keep track, but I can't follow everything because, especially at the beginning of the full-scale war, there was a massive number of offers for exhibitions and events from all over the world. It is difficult to recall all of them. The event that can be called a key one: I had a personal exhibition in Tbilisi dedicated to the defenders of Mariupol. Recently, my work has also been featured in the "When Walls Talk" exhibition, dedicated to 100 years of European history in posters, at the House of European History at the European Parliament in Brussels. We went there as members of Ukrainian delegation and talked about the war. 

There is a lot of support for Ukraine in the world, you can see blue and yellow flags everywhere, but people seem to be living in fairy tales. They think that it is possible to negotiate with someone, to seek compromise. This is normal, because European civilization has come to the conclusion that if people have a dispute, they can come to an agreement. This doesn't work with Russia. That is why it is important to go there and tell the truth. 

It is also worth to mention the exhibition of Ukrainian artists “Ukraine. Under a Different Sky” in the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art, a gallery in Warsaw. Twenty-one posters from the series of the Arcana Belli Ukrainian tarot deck were first exhibited there. I created the first card before March 8. It was a kind of congratulation for women on their holiday, because there I portrayed the Ukrainian empress — the embodiment of Venus. As for now, I have created the Major Arcana — 21 cards, but I am still working on a 78-card deck that will be printed soon. 

— How does the ninth month of the full-scale war affect your creativity? 

— As before, I create my war posters addressing some actual events. We still need to draw the posters, at least so that our messages appear in the media space of people from other countries who are tired of the news and do not follow the war. However, I have resumed working on projects that take a lot of time and are no longer a direct representation of an event or my attitude towards it. In these projects I work with culture per se, analyzing the phenomena that I propose to think about, raising the issues that require analysis in order to have deeper understanding of our global confrontation.