Yevgenia Belorusets

A powerful, off-beat collection of stories about the women living in the shadow of the now-frozen, now-thawing war in Ukraine after the 2014 Revolution of Dignity

Lucky Breaks

Nikita Kadan

Lesia Khomenko

The seventh edition of the dimunitive isolarii (meaning ‘island texts’) is titled ‘In the Face of War’, with Yevgenia Belorusets, Nikita Kadan, and Lesia Khomenko answering an age-old question: what is art to do in the face of war?

Published on the occasion of the 2022 Venice Biennale exhibition This is Ukraine: Defending Freedom, issue seven is the culmination of Yevgenia’s war diary, alongside monumental work by Kadan and Khomenko.

‘The young artists in this book continue to live and work in wartime Ukraine. They confront the daily onslaught of death and its reckoning. But, in the face of war, they still preserve its unintelligibility. It is by such means that history might walk down another path than the one its perpetrators intend.’

In partnership with the Office of the President of Ukraine and the PinchukArtCentre, featuring the War Diary of Yevgenia Belorusets.

Ukraine 2022

In the Face of War

A quotidian but passionate, low-to-the-ground yet deeply penetrating document with photos by the author of the first forty-one days of the Russian invasion of Ukraine co-published with Isolarii

War Diary

In the age of autofiction and its attendant narcissism, the young, Berlin-based Yevgenia Belorusets is a point of relief. Her work, grounded in years as a photo-journalist, is exuberant rather than premeditated. It brings together the stories of many to form its identity.MODERN ANIMAL knots together humans and animals, retelling interviews, folktales, memories, and visions of the people--bourgeois, urban, rural, Roma, working class--encountered on a five-year journey through Ukraine. A lecture format, following the Soviet style, disintegrates; as, at times, do logic and language. The product is a revolutionary approach to anthropology, what it means to become and behave like something else.Without judgement or simplification, Belorusets provides intimate revelations of human-animal relationships: how we shape each other, use each other, and, at times, cross the lines that distinguish us from one another. In conversation, she finds the lost and forgotten remains of something pagan, but still irrepressibly modern.

A Cycle of Lectures on the Modern Lives of Animals

Modern Animal

A monumental, deeply penetrating document of life in Kyiv during the first forty-one days of the Russian invasion of Ukraine The young artist and writer Yevgenia Belorusets was in her hometown of Kyiv when Putin’s “special military operation” against Ukraine began on the morning of February 24, 2022. With the shelling of Kyiv, Kharkiv, Odessa, and Kherson, the war with Russia had clearly, irreversibly begun: “I thought, this has been allowed to happen, it is a crime against everything human, against a great common space where we live and hope for a future.” With power and clarity, the War Diary of Yevgenia Belorusets documents the long beginning of the devastation and its effects on the ordinary residents of Ukraine; what it feels like to interact with the strangers who suddenly become your “countrymen”; the struggle to make sense of a good mood on a spring day; the new danger of a routine coffee run. First published in the German newspaper Der Spiegel and then translated and released each day on the site ISOLARII (and on Artforum), the War Diary had an immediate impact worldwide: it was translated by an anonymous collective of writers on Weibo; read live by Margaret Atwood on International Women’s Day; adapted for an episode of This American Life on NPR; and brought to the 2022 Venice Biennale by President Zelensky as part of the pavilion “This is Ukraine: Defending Freedom.”

Glückliche Fälle

Captivating, innovative Ukrainian fiction about displaced women living in the shadow of the war with Russia 'This singular collection brings Ukraine, "the land of residual phenomena," entirely to life' Kirkus Reviews In Lucky Breaks, we encounter anonymous women from the margins of Ukrainian society, their lives upended by the ongoing conflict with Russia. A woman, bewildered by her broken umbrella, tries to abandon it like a sick relative; a beautiful florist suddenly disappears, her shop converted into a warehouse for propaganda; hiding out from the shelling, neighbours read horoscopes in the local paper that tell them when it's safe for them to go outside. In stories of linguistic verve and absurdist wit, Yevgenia Belorusets writes of trauma amidst the mundane, telling surreal, unsettling tales of survival in a shattered country.

Yevgenia Belorusets

About

Books

Join the club