Ukrainian Artist Polina Raiko’s Home-Museum Probably Misplaced to Flood
As a result of destruction of the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Energy Plant throughout the Dnipro River in Russian-occupied territories of Ukraine on June 6, the house-museum of Ukrainian artist Polina Raiko — whose work had been a novel instance of Ukrainian Artwork Brut and monumental artwork — is probably going misplaced to a flood. The Kherson artist Semen Khramtsov reported on Fb yesterday that the home stuffed with frescoes was “underwater” and that museum staff had been evacuated and secure. “There’s a want for drugs, meals, consuming water,” Khramtsov wrote.
In a remark to Hyperallergic, Khramtsov shared that his sources residing in occupied Oleshky have confirmed that the constructing had been submerged, with solely its rooftop seen above the water. As for the frescoes inside the home, the extent of their harm stays unknown, as a few of them had been painted over the wallpaper.
Raiko used her artwork as a method to deal with private trauma, treating her home surfaces as a canvas. All the things in the home — partitions, ceilings, doorways, and fence — Raiko coated in enamel-painted drawings of improbable birds and flowers, Christian iconography, and the artist’s personal interpretations of her goals and life occasions.
Polina Raiko, who died in 2004, was a self-taught outsider artist from Oleshky. She began to attract in 1998 on the age of 69 within the wake of tragic household occasions — the deaths of her husband and daughter and her son’s incarceration. In 2008, artist Viacheslav Mashnytsky launched a basis to protect Raiko’s legacy. Mashnytskyi went lacking after the Russian occupation of Kherson in 2022.
Oleshky, a city within the Kherson area at the moment occupied by the Russian Federation, was flooded after the Nova Kakhovka Dam breach. On October 20, 2022, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky claimed that Russia mined the dam, warned concerning the potential explosion, and requested a global mission to watch a possible “large-scale catastrophe.”
The dam’s destruction induced a humanitarian and environmental disaster, with 30 settlements flooded and greater than 2,300 folks evacuated from the affected areas. Many historic and archeological websites are vulnerable to disappearing.
