Kostiantyn Doroshenko/Tie2.lt

In the landscape of contemporary Ukrainian art, Volodymyr Budnikov is a rock that cannot be conquered on a leisurely stroll. His art is demanding of the viewer, intellectually unrestrained and emotionally audacious. In 2022, the independent Ukrainian cultural studies journal Ї awarded the artist its Order “For Intellectual Courage” — “for a courageous intellectual interpretation of postmodern reality, both in times of peace and amid the calamity of war”.

Volodymyr Budnikov taught painting at the National Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture in Kyiv and at the Zhao Mengfu College of Art at Huzhou University in China. From the late 1980s onward, he worked and exhibited in Germany, and in 1993 his art became the subject of a dissertation at Humboldt University of Berlin. His works are held in the collections of leading Ukrainian museums as well as international collections, including those of Peter Ludwig, Norton Dodge and Deutsche Bank.

During the years of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Budnikov has actively participated in international exhibitions in France, the Czech Republic, Poland, Azerbaijan and Germany.

In July, Berlin’s Künstlerhof Frohnau art centre, with the support of the ChervoneChorne Yurii Stashkiv Foundation, hosted Harvest of Time, a collaborative project by Volodymyr Budnikov and American experimental composer and sound artist Ray Kaczynski.

Over the course of its history, the site in the Frohnau forest has witnessed the “harvest” of many different fates. In the 1920s, it housed a military hospital; in the 1950s, a pulmonary sanatorium; and from the 1970s onward, a branch of a psychiatric clinic. In the early 1990s, during the Yugoslav Wars, it became a refugee camp for people from Bosnia and Herzegovina. In 1998, German artist, curator and civic activist Dieter Ruckhaberle succeeded in securing the complex on a long-term lease for an artists’ association. Today, among others, Volodymyr Budnikov has his studio there.

Music occupies an important place in your life — I might even call you an opera aficionado. Ray Kaczynski’s art is of a different kind: he works with sound in real time, and much of what he does might appear to be improvisational. Why were you particularly interested in collaborating with him?

When we think of opera, it almost automatically seems synonymous with the classical tradition. Yet in reality, it is a synthetic musical action — the Italian word opera means “action,” “work,” or “creation” — that takes on a new form with every new era. So my fascination with the radical musical avant-garde of the twentieth century in no way contradicts my love of classical music. For example, last year the Berlin Philharmonie presented a Cubist opera from the Bauhaus era, and not long before that I travelled to the church where Cage’s Organ²/ASLSP project has been unfolding continuously for many years. Ray is not only a representative of complex experimental music; he is also a multidisciplinary artist who often combines his musical performances with performance art, poetry and video. But it is important to note that his works are not improvisations in the conventional sense. You could say that our methodologies are similar because we both work with abstraction based on images encountered in reality or in other works of art. Art always comes from art, and even when newer art negates what came before it, in doing so it also validates it.

Landscape is one of the central themes of your art. How does it relate to abstraction for you?

The starting point for my abstractions is almost always a specific landscape or a combination of several landscapes. But upon this concrete, visible reality are layered my knowledge — or lack of knowledge — of what I have seen, my memories and imagination, my perception of the image in real time, my mood, and my thoughts about the rhythms and patterns of what I see. For instance, in the forest I have been painting lately, I imagine ruins: the fractured outlines of residential buildings back home in Ukraine, destroyed by Russian attacks. But I understand that any account of this combination will itself be an abstraction for people living in those parts of Europe that remain at peace, just as the Russo-Ukrainian War itself still remains an abstraction to them. The abstract painting I create, however, can point to this horrifying picture of our shared reality with all its force.

The video accompanying Ray Kaczynski’s performance also featured landscapes — moving, unsettling ones. Tanks appear in it. Can this be understood as a reflection on Russia’s war against Ukraine?

Absolutely. But in creating the video, Ray Kaczynski was thinking not only about the full-scale war Russia is waging in Ukraine, but also about its true roots. In the video, he draws a parallel between the pathos of propaganda slogans that fed the mass illusion of a new and happy life both in the Soviet Union and in the United States. His choice of the harvest as a theme is far from accidental, because the harvest became a symbol of the greatness of superpowers. Ray is an American of Polish descent who lives in Berlin, which is perhaps why his perspective is so multidimensional. In his video, tanks rhyme visually with combine harvesters. In this way, he points to another symbolism of the harvest — one that concerns the responsibility of the sower, as well as the conscience of all those who cultivated the culture that ultimately led to the horrors of today’s war. After all, the word “culture” does not have an exclusively positive meaning, does it?

If we turn to Latin, the term “culture” refers to agriculture and a settled way of life. It is worth remembering that Cain belonged to this kind of culture, whereas Abel was a herdsman and a nomad. More broadly, the concept of culture encompasses everything humanity considers valuable. And here it is impossible to avoid reflecting on colonialism and its use of cultural clichés to rank peoples and nations. You have been engaged with the Western European art scene for many years. How do these clichés operate?

Since the beginning of the full-scale war, my wife, Vlada Ralko, and I have been living and working primarily in Berlin, so I will probably speak from my experience in Germany. On the one hand, culture fares well here: there is space for it, and that space is always a political field. But whereas institutional support for abstract art, in opposition to the former totalitarian aesthetic, was once a serious political gesture, today an educational narrative predominates in the most visible artistic practices. I am speaking about a subject close to me — art — but when art is free and attentive, it reveals the essence of ongoing cultural processes. Russia successfully exploits this. As a worthy successor to the USSR, it corrupts and instrumentalises cultural processes. Put simply, it manages culture for its own benefit. This works because so-called Russian culture is regarded in Europe as something a priori elevated and valuable. And alongside this unquestioned assumption of the greatness of Russian culture, an unresolved German colonialism somehow emerges beneath the surface.

What tendencies have you observed in the way Ukrainian art has been perceived in Germany since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine?

It resembles absorption. Germany accepts a language whose rules it has itself established for the present moment. In fact, it resembles the attitude towards refugees: assimilate or become invisible. This approach could be compared to a desire to adjust one’s own vision — to choose what is allowed into the field of view and what is not.

And what processes do you observe in contemporary artistic life in Ukraine?

Good art is falling silent or distancing itself from the state, which is an extremely alarming sign at a time when Ukraine’s survival depends on preserving its statehood. The state, in turn, divides art into art for domestic consumption and art to be placed in the shop window for the West. Meanwhile, bad art has mounted the patriotic hobbyhorse. The state is instrumentalising culture and art according to an old Soviet habit. As long as this continues, we will keep losing.

Harvest is the season for gathering what has been sown and grown. Your project with Ray Kaczynski left a sense of anxiety, but also a feeling of an open ending — like the smell of ozone after a storm. The painting, sound and video addressed not only the present but also turned over layers of the modernist projects of the past. What kind of harvest are we gathering?

During the performance, the studio was dark. We covered the windows with my paintings. A little daylight filtered through them, making the paintings resemble stained glass and lending the space a solemn quality. As Ray and I prepared for the event, each of us seemed to be moving towards the other, yet until the very last moment we did not know exactly how our joint action would unfold. When we cast seeds, we have to do it properly, because if we merely imitate the act of sowing, no culture will grow. I am speaking here about our very intimate, invisible process of preparing for the performance — a process filled with trust and responsibility. This mutual interest could be called solidarity, because each of us searched within our own history for points that might help illuminate the history of the other. In the twelfth year of the Russo-Ukrainian War and the fifth year of the full-scale war, we are reaping a bloody harvest sown by the Soviet system — and it sowed those seeds throughout the world. Yet every movement, however small, modest or desperate, aimed at bringing clarity to the all-encompassing darkness of the present — a darkness that for now seems only to be growing denser — can weaken the position of this resilient Soviet colossus, which, after all, still stands on feet of clay.