The bilingual Ukrainian-English collection Meaning after Loss, was created within the special Martin Roth-Initiative (MRI) project on feminist foreign policy “Ukraine 2024–2025.” The collection includes 19 projects—both visual and textual—by Ukrainian women artists who, for the most part, continue to live and work in Ukraine during the war. In 2024 and 2025, they took part in a six-month feminist art residency organized by the Martin Roth-Initiative. The authors work in the fields of contemporary art, theater, film, and literature. They live in different cities across Ukraine: Kyiv, Kharkiv, Lviv, Ivano-Frankivsk, Mykolaiv, Zaporizhzhia, Khmelnytskyi. Some of them are displaced persons from the Luhansk, Donetsk, and Kherson regions, who relocated to other Ukrainian cities as a result of Russian aggression and occupation.

All works, in different forms, reflect the experiences of living through the war in Ukraine, as well as fragments of the experiences of refugees beyond its borders. The pages reveal personal and collective traumas, transformations of identity and worldview, fantasies and dreams about alternative realities, and reflections on making choices. The collection is divided into four sections: “Territory and Vision,” “Identity, Trauma,” “Utopias and Metaphors,” and “Experiences and Communities,” which outline the range of interests and themes explored by the participants.

Artists: Eva Alvor, Iryna Beschetnova, Veronika Cherednychenko,
Yuliia Danylevska, Kateryna Krokha, Olena Kurzel, Alena Kuznetsova,
Maryna Levchenko, Yulia Linnik, Maria Matiashova, Olena Morozova,
Polina Petrishyna, Dzvinka Pinchuk, Dasha Podoltseva, Anna Potyomkina,
Karina Synytsia, Hanna Trofimova, Zlata Veresniak, Ola Yeriemieieva

Edited by Oksana Briukhovetska
Art direction: Valeriia Karpan, Maryna Marynichenko
Translation into English: Helena Kernan
Design and layout: Lara Yakovenko
Project coordinator: Mariia Borysova

The book can be downloaded here: https://www.martin-roth-initiative.de/en/ukrainian-women-artists-publication