Tetiana Eva Hershuni, a Ukrainian Canadian postmodernist, has presented her canvas to the Cultural Heritage Museum.
Her picture, Nostalgia, was, without doubt, the hit of last year’s Women’s Business (project coordinator: Yuri Matsiuk) exhibit representing Ukrainian ОmigrО women artists. Much to capital art devotees’ joy, the exhibit marked the beginning of contemporary art expositions at the municipal museums.
Owing to the Kyiv City History Museum’s openness to aesthetic quest and the staff’s enthusiasm, its branch, the Cultural Heritage Museum, is working on Ukraine’s first standing contemporary art exposition. Its concept, considering the branch’s specialty, is reduced to the creative attainments of the Ukrainian diaspora. Hershuni’s Nostalgia will occupy the place of honor there. While museum research fellows were studying her art, Eva kindly agreed to a brief interview with The Day.
How did you find yourself in Canada and what are you busy with at present?
Eva: What made me leave Kyiv and Ukraine five years ago was perhaps mostly trying to find a different art situation. Also, a number of purely existentialist aspects that I have been working on ever since.
At present, I teach design and drawing at a college of classical animation, visual art, and design. I’m working on a news series of color abstractions after a longed and forced interval.
Was your experience at the fine arts faculty of the Ukrainian Art Academy useful?
Eva: An academic education is like a portable personal library, it is forever stored in your head. And the systemic knowledge of art theory and history I received at the Kyiv academy is like a credit card that never expires in my teaching practice, as I need constant historical references, including old masters and modern classics. My personal experience shows that the kind of training one gets at the Ukrainian Arts Academy matches the world’s most prestigious institutions of this kind. As an artist, I was fortunate to meet my former professor Oleksandr Poluyanov outside the academy. It is his drawing method that I currently teach my students. As a rule, the rest you learn from your own experience.
What literary and critical works have influenced you most?
Eva: Realism and surrealism are two basic trends that I regard as an everlasting and indivisible alchemic substance. Paul Delvaux and his worlds galvanized by inner desire, passion, and an outward emotional vacuum, with women walking the streets in a state of lunatic ecstasy, perhaps find the most vivid response in me. My Sugar Plum Vision installation was included in Martha Kuzma’s project in Kyiv several years ago and it had a direct visual and emotional reference to Delvaux.
Which of the art projects you have been involved in of late seem most interesting?
Eva: The Revolutions group project in Canada proved among the most unpredictable. It resulted in a CD representing individual audio works of every participant. The project was organized by the Video Verite Art Center of Saskatoon. Handling audio and digital programs, where the sound could be edited, was a new creative experience for me. In a way I consider participation in that project unique. There have been other video, photo, and art projects elsewhere in Canada.
How did you feel about an exhibit including your works at a branch of the History of Kyiv Museum?
Eva: The Cultural Heritage Museum’s offer made me feel flattered and surprised at the same time. I was happy to know people still remembered me in my home city. The fact that I was represented by a branch of the museum where I had started as a designer is proof that one never knows what will happen next, and that there is a way the past can penetrate the future.
Do you consider yourself a Ukrainian or Canadian artist?
Eva: This is quite a good question. There is no inner geopolitics, there is just an external policy. It is enough for me to still consider myself an artist.
Do you feel cosmopolitan within Canadian society? Are there any problems in terms if self-identity and ethnic roots?
Eva: Strange as it may seem, self-identity and ethnic roots are most important in a cosmopolitan society. My roots grow from Kyiv and its unique alchemy, with shadows from the past still among the living. I became especially keenly aware of this when visiting home after two years in Canada.
Does this explain your particular interest in the Khazar khaganate?
Eva: To me, the Khazars and their land are a call from the mist of centuries, roots lost in an unimaginably distant past, but with a mystical power still very much alive. I have this enigmatic knowledge deep inside and it defies logic.
So what is contemporary art?
Eva: So far as I am concerned, it is constant search, a personal Odyssey. All the rest is politics.
