Thanks to the AdHoc-Fellowship “Weltoffenes Berlin” funded by the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe, the Berlin Artistic Research Grant Programme is able to grant three Ukrainian artists, Yevgenia Belorusets, Mykola Ridnyi and Volodymyr Vorotniov a fellowship in 2022/23.

Yevgenia Belorusets is an artist and writer living and working in Berlin and partly Kyiv. She is a founder and editor of “Prostory”, the journal for literature and art, and a member of the curatorial group “Hudrada”. She works with photography and other media on the intersection of art, literature and social activism. Her photographic work calls attention to the vulnerable spheres of Ukrainian society: queer families, unemployed coal miners, Roma people and those living in the Eastern war zone. Belorusets work was shown in the Ukrainian pavilion at the 56th and 59th Venice Biennale. “Lucky Breaks,” her first work of fiction, was honored with the 2020 HKW International Literature Award in Germany. For her work “Kyiv Diary” she received the 2022 Schering Stiftung Special Award for Artistic Research and the Horst Bingel Prize for Literature. Belorusets has been documenting Russia’s invasion of Ukraine from inside Kyiv since February 24, 2022.

During her fellowship, she is working on the project “The Modern Life of Animals” which will include a book publication in combination with visual works. Her research is dedicated to the changing flora and fauna in the context of war and transformational processes in Ukrainian society. Parallel to the Revolution of Dignity (2013-2014), a hardly visible revolution took place in Ukraine – an awakening of the animal rights movement, which developed in the context of conversations around natural habitats. Despite the new escalation of the invasion war since February 24 in 2022, under the circumstances of humanitarian disasters and genocidal crimes, the animal rights movement has not disappeared, but has noticeably strengthened.