Maria’s Multiple Bodies
By Nataliya Tchermalykh (University of Geneva)
Maria Kulikovskaya, Sculpture with Bullet Hole I, 2019. A face of a woman, made of skin-colored soap with a hole of a bullet around the left eye.
This essay speaks about the war in Ukraine through the eyes of Ukrainian artists who generously shared with me not only their observations, feelings, and the objects they make but also their theoretical visions on personal and political events unfolding before their eyes. For myself, this plurivocal ethnographic experiment was an attempt to reconcile facets of my professional identity that often are in profound disagreement: me, a Western-trained anthropologist not working in Ukraine, and me, a Ukrainian woman who has spent a large part of her life with artists. Both of them could not find a just standpoint to write, buried in constant grief and a bitter feeling that Geertz (1988) beautifully terms the “burden of authorship” in the face of unspeakable events that seemed (and still seem) ethnographically indescribable.
This story is about Maria Kulikovskaya—a performer and visual artist whose work tackles a wide range of feminist and politically relevant themes. Maria’s story is one of artistic premonitions—something that Behar (2012) calls “the eerie power of fiction that foretells the future.” The story reflects her deep and almost supernatural way of feeling and unraveling the catastrophic that is often buried under the impenetrable layers of political discourse. In 2014, after the annexation of Crimea, Maria laid down on the steps of the biggest museum in Saint Petersburg covered by a Ukrainian flag. The war in Eastern Ukraine was about to begin. In a 2016 performance, she screamed, naked on the sand of the still-peaceful beach in Mariupol, in response to the sounds of the explosions in nearby cities. In 2019, two years before the Russian invasion, she created sculptural self-portraits—identical copies of her body made of soap—with bullet holes around her head and heart. “Sometimes I am afraid of my own works,” she told me. “They tend to come true.”
Maria Kulikovskaya, Sculptures with Bullet Holes, 2019. Five realistic sculptures representing female bodies, made of colored soap, are standing in a forest. Each of them has holes of bullets around the neck, the face, or the heart.
Maria first experimented with sculpture as a twenty-something-year-old art student in Kyiv, in 2010–2011, reproducing her body in white plaster. Over the following years, she’s used the same technique of molding, now fixing the contours of her gradually changing body in sculptures made of translucent, colorful soap. When placed outside, under the mercy of winds, rain and snow, Maria’s “bodies,” covered with white foam, slowly fade away, becoming thinner and thinner. These objects, “shaped as a woman, a human being,” signified the fragility of human life. “After all, soap has a structure very similar to human flesh: it is a combination of water and fat!” Maria once told me. “Even gunmakers test their weapons on it.”
Some of Maria’s bodies have had lives of their own. In 2012, a range of her body sculptures were exhibited in IZOLATZIA—an independent art center located near the city of Donetsk, in Eastern Ukraine. After the end of the exhibition, the sculptures remained there. In summer 2014, several months after the annexation of Maria’s native Crimea, the city of Donetsk was at the heart of the new war. The heavily armed paramilitary—Russian citizens who crossed the Ukrainian border and local impoverished populations armed by Russia—seized large Eastern Ukrainian cities, proclaiming the independence of the so-called Popular Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk. A long and exhausting war began. During the first months of occupation, the paramilitary turned IZOLATZIA into a prison and a place of torture. Twenty of Maria’s fragile, soap-made bodies were used for target practice. All of them were heavily damaged; someone sent her the photographs the occupiers were taking and posting as jokes on social media.
Several months later, at the opening of a group exhibition in London, Maria appeared naked, holding a hammer. She smashed one of her body sculptures, making explicit reference to the destruction of her art in Donbas. Maria called this performance Happy Birthday and dedicated it to her mother, who she could not congratulate, since her native Crimea was cut off from any communication channels after its annexation in March 2014.
Since then, the body sculptures have seemed to acquire their own biographies, partially separated from the artist’s—biographies that she could later analyze, almost as a distant observer, and reintegrate into her emerging work.
Maria Kulikovskaya, Happy Birthday, documentation of a performance, London, 2015. A naked woman wearing a pink wig is about to destroy with a hammer a sculpture representing a female body.
In 2019, Maria appeared in Forgotten, a feature film by Daria Onishchenko, playing the role of a pro-Russian propagandist journalist. We see her shoot her own soap sculptures, creating large bullet holes in the head and around the heart. Reflecting on the film, Maria said, “I tried to reconstruct these moments to find an answer. Why did they shoot them? But I still don’t have any—only these sculptures with holes inside.”
When I interviewed Maria in March 2022, she had already become a war refugee, temporarily living in Austria. On the recording of our conversation, I hear not only her voice but also her daughter crying and her mom singing to calm her down:
I didn’t sleep the night before the war began. I heard the first explosions in real time. I didn’t have any illusions about it, I knew the war would come. My bag with some money, documents and diapers was ready. After the first explosions, we ran to the metro to hide, but there were too many people there, the station was crowded, and we went back home. We were hiding in the parking lot. The explosions restarted. They were louder and louder. It was like a horror movie: dark clouds, thick fog, it was dark. I was paralyzed with fear, but wanted to save Eva, she is only five months old.
In Kyiv, we live on the 21st floor, just in front of the TV tower that was destroyed several days later. In Eva’s room we arranged large new windows, so she could see the TV tower and its lights. When the war started, I covered these new, beautiful windows with tape—now I was afraid of the fragility of their glass. We slept on the cardboard under several blankets, as far from windows as we could. During the night, we heard shelling and Kalashnikovs. It was total chaos. We were spending days and nights in the parking lot, on cardboards. The smell of gasoline was unbearable.
After a missile fell on my friend’s house, I had a breakdown. I yelled and cried, and yelled again: it was too much. We had to go now, I knew it. But my husband had just sold our car. I was reaching out to taxis, to people with cars—please, take us, I will pay you as much as you want, just take us out of here. But no one could—we were five people, including a baby, and there was not enough space.
Maria recounts what she calls their skitaniya—their wanderings—that lasted almost three weeks. By a miracle, they were driven out of Kyiv by a woman from the same building, who they met accidentally in the basement during an air raid. She had a car, but was afraid of driving alone with her son and their three cats. Together, they drove east, from curfew to curfew: first to Khmelnytskyi, then to Mukachevo, and finally to Uzhhorod, a small town at the border with Hungary. Once there, “Eva fell ill, she had diarrhea. She did not take a bath or sleep in a bed for weeks. My parents too were losing hope, and thought about going back to Kyiv. We knew no one in Western Ukraine.”
But then a “miracle” happened: a museum in Austria offered Maria—with her daughter and parents—a short-term residency. The museum director even came to Uzhhorod to pick them up by car, driving 1,000 km back and forth. Maria’s husband went back to Kyiv, as Ukrainian men are not allowed to leave Ukraine.
At the very moment when we crossed the border, we received an unexpected gift: sunflower seeds made of porcelain, by Ai Weiwei. Ai Weiwei and our host had had dinner just before he came to Ukraine, and the artist regretted not having a gift for us. He looked in his pockets, and found four seeds—one per member of my family. For us this was a gift of a future life and peace. We wrapped them in a piece of cloth, and stored them with our documents, in a “safe bag” where we keep important objects.
A screenshot of Maria Kulikovskaya’s whatsapp exchange with Ai Weiwei. The picture shows four hands holding sunflower seeds.
One of the objects Maria regrets having left behind is her latest self-portrait, made of translucent soap with visible bullets inside, which she uncovered for the first time the day before the war: “Creating a soap sculpture takes time: similar to a butterfly in a cocoon, a soap sculpture has to rest for a long time in a silicone mold. The first day of the war, in the basement, she was there with us. But then, we left her behind, in a besieged city.”
The sculptures that were originally meant to represent Maria’s exploration of the boundaries of her individual body came to signify the transformation of territorial borders under the influence of international politics, war, and invasion—and their impact on human bodies and of Ukrainian women as a collectivity. After February 24, 2022, Ukrainian women were the first to experience a new form of agentive mobility: they have become the initiators of displacement, leading their extended families out of Ukraine, toward relative safety and an uncertain future.
“Yak ty?” (How have you been?) is the most common question that Ukrainian women, including myself, exchanged relentlessly during the months of February and March 2022. One of my friend’s responses struck me by its accuracy: “I am so-so-so tired. I have a feeling of living multiple lives: my previous life, my refugee-life, my family life, my life with the news, and more.” This phrase made me think about Maria’s sculptures: long before the war, Maria seemed to have predicted this now commonly shared experience through her multiple sculptural bodies, strewn across cities of a war-torn country, as marks of violence, destruction, and expanding invasion—and as “empty shells” of her previous selves.
Maria Kulikovskaya, Sculpture with Flowers and Bullets, February 23, 2022. A sculpture representing a female body made of translucent soap with bullets and flowers inside.
References Cited
Behar, Ruth. 2012. The Vulnerable Observer. Boston: Beacon Press.
Geertz, Clifford. 1988. Works and Lives. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
All pictures courtesy of the artist.