A year ago, Russian President Vladimir Putin launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Today, the war rages on. More than 8 million Ukrainians have fled and upwards of 8,300 people in Ukraine have been killed.
Exhibitions at the Museum of Russian Art and the Mill City Museum show paintings and photographs, respectively, that depict the ongoing trauma.
Ukrainian Jewish artist/architect Elena Kalman's exhibition "Ukraine Defiant," which draws inspiration from Ukrainian landscape paintings, fills the second-floor mezzanine level at the Museum of Russian Art.
"Ukraine: War and Resistance" at the Mill City Museum shows a suite of 41 photographs shot by Fulbright Scholars in Ukraine. Some date to Russia's 2014 annexation of Crimea and the invasion of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions.
University of Minnesota Fulbright Scholar Roman Tyshchenko helped bring the photography show to Minnesota.
"My colleagues in Ukraine realized it would be more beneficial for people from outside of Ukraine to see [the photography show] because Ukrainians see stuff like that on a daily basis," Tyshchenko said.
His journey to America was fraught by war. He first fled his home in Kyiv, living in the western part of the country for two months, and then saw his family in the east before leaving.
In Oksana Parafeniuk's photograph, two youths pose for a portrait in the woods. They hold wooden cutouts of guns and lean against each other on a break during territorial defense exercises. In another Parafeniuk photo, a resident gazes off into the distance smoking a cigarette, while sitting atop a checkpoint in his village. Brendan Hoffman's photograph shows someone removing a road sign in order to confuse Russian troops.
