Bloodied, despondent, clutching a toy: the Ukrainian artists savaging refugee portrait stereotypes

One of the women says that when she was living under occupation – in the town of Makariv, west of Kyiv, near Bucha, which fell under Russian control at the start of the full-scale invasion – she just pulled hers into a ponytail and it went unwashed for days on end.

If people aren’t suffering enough, they’re not interesting enough This scene is being created for the Ukrainian pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale, the most important international clan-gathering of the global art world, and one that always shines a light on the geopolitical mood of the moment.

For the previous edition, which opened in April 2022 hard on the heels of the Russian full-scale invasion, Ukrainian artist Pavlo Makov somehow, miraculously, managed to escape bombarded Kharkiv to be able to show his work at the event.

Photograph: Joel Goodman/The GuardianThe pavilion will show an intimate, moving hour-long film cut together by Andrii Rachynskyi and Daniil Revkovskyi from footage posted by citizens to YouTube, placing the viewer right inside the civilian experience of invasion.

We see the same face everywhere in the news, when any house is destroyed in Kharkiv or Kyiv Dostliev explains to the Ukrainian women that today’s scenario, with the Liverpool-based actor Pay, is about the image of the lone female victim of war: the woman photographed outside her bombed home, in the shock of loss.

Hundreds of such images have circulated; Gorbatski mentions one in particular that became totemic in the first months of the full-scale invasion, showing nursery teacher Olena Kurilo’s bloodied and bandaged face after her apartment near Kharkiv was hit.