Tickets: $15 suggested · Sliding scale
If you are able to pay more, we encourage you to do so. Your generosity directly supports Oksana's work and St. Volodymyr Institute's ability to continue community-focused organizing in Toronto.
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The Stain of Blood: On Art in Wartime Ukraine. A Performative Reading by Oksana Briukhovetska
What does it mean to make art when your country is at war? When your studio is a shelter, your subject is survival, and some of the artists you love have gone to the front and not come home.
Kyiv-based artist, curator, and writer Oksana Briukhovetska will bring her answers in a performative reading that is part testimony, part meditation, part act of witness. Drawing on her deep engagement with Ukraine's contemporary art community, she will share what art looks like from the inside of an ongoing war: the daily realities, the impossible choices, the strategies people use to keep creating and keep living. And she will honour the artists and fighters Ukraine has lost.
About Oksana Briukhovetska
Oksana Briukhovetska is an artist, curator, and writer whose practice centres on textile collage and critical writing about Ukrainian contemporary art. Her work engages themes of memory, trauma, women's labour, feminism, solidarity, and decolonization.
She served as a co-curator for the Ukrainian chapter of Secondary Archive, the platform for women artists from Central and Eastern Europe (2021–2024), and as curator at the Martin Roth Initiative residency for Ukrainian women artists (2024–2025), which culminated in the publication and exhibition Meaning after Loss (2025). In 2025, Oksana published Voices of Black Lives Matter, based on interviews conducted with Americans during the 2020–2021 protests.
She lives and works in Kyiv.