NATURE MORTE: THE EXTERMINATION OF UKRAINE

For the past 20 years, Piers Secunda (b.1976-) has been making art about the destruction of culture, with extensive bodies of work about the Taliban, ISIS in Iraq, and other geopolitical events.

This August, Piers Secunda will present Nature Morte: The Extermination of Ukraine. A new exhibition examining Russia’s attempt to delete Ukraine’s cultural history and national identity. The culmination of three years of research, the exhibition brings together 21 paintings, a half hour documentary film and an extensive body of evidence gathered during Secunda’s visits to Ukraine.

The 21 paintings in the exhibition portray traditional Ukrainian foods and their ingredients. Each painting contains a QR code that acts as a portal to an archive of evidence, which displays the names and photos of the Russian government officials and military personnel responsible for:

– The looting of Ukrainian Art
– The kidnap of Ukrainian children and their forced adoption into Russian families.
– The kidnap and forced military training of Ukrainian children, for use by the Russian army.
– The 2023 missile strike on Odesa Cathedral.

The paintings are made with ink produced by Secunda in his studio, using charcoal gathered in Kharkiv, from the first Ukrainian government building destroyed during Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022. The names and faces of the perpetrators are presented alongside supporting material, including articles published in the Russian media, in which these activities are discussed. Further insight into the Russian-language material is provided by Ukrainian religious historian and academic Vlad Havrilov, whose research examines the Kremlin’s use of the Russian Orthodox Church as an instrument of war. Some of the individuals identified are sanctioned in Ukraine and / or the EU but remain unsanctioned in the UK.

The archive combines open-source evidence with information gathered through extensive interviews with Ukrainian NGOs, museum and archive professionals, cultural-sector workers, government employees, independent researchers and intelligence services.

The exhibition will also present an infographic, mapping 5,048 recorded points of damage to cultural sites across Ukraine. The map is an ongoing collaborative data-collection project, bringing separate records together, to create a visual account of the scale and geographic reach of cultural damage in Ukraine.

A new 40 minute film by long-term collaborator David Miller, will accompany the exhibition. Filmed in cities across Ukraine, it follows Secunda’s research and records the effects of cultural destruction through interviews with the head of the Ukrainian State Archives, museum directors, cultural workers, the Arch-Priest of Odesa Cathedral and a lawyer helping to draft legislation through which Ukraine can pursue reparations for destroyed cultural sites.

15% of the proceeds from artwork sales during the exhibition will be donated to the fund supporting the restoration of recent damage to a 12th-century church at the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra.

About Piers Secunda
Piers Secunda was born in London in 1976 and studied painting at Chelsea College of Arts, graduating in 1998. Over the past 25 years his increasingly research-led practice has focused on the destruction of culture: why it occurs, what it means and what it reveals about the societies responsible.

In 2018, Secunda’s work documenting cultural damage by ISIS, was used as a diplomatic tool between the Kurdish and Baghdad governments. In 2023, research for his exhibition on the WWII occupation of the British island of Alderney, contributed to a UK Government inquiry into deaths on the island and is the subject of a feature-length documentary on Channel 4.

His work has been exhibited internationally and is held in collections including the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Ashmolean Museum, the 9/11 Memorial & Museum in New York, the Iraq National Museum, The Mosul Museum, the UK Government Art Collection and UNESCO.