Dana Kavelina Revives Traditional Animation to Confront War and Technology

Ukrainian artist Dana Kavelina creatively utilizes puppetry, stop-motion, and miniature sets to delve into themes like technology, the human body, warfare, and historical injustices. Her 2023 stop-motion film, 'The Lemberg Machine,' loosely interprets the 1941 Lviv Pogroms with puppet characters speaking in Russian and Yiddish within scale-model environments. One striking moment features a woman jumping into a fire without catching flame, all while German soldiers cheer. Kavelina’s art beautifully balances horror with absurdity. In 'Letter to a Turtledove' (2020), she merges drawings and found footage, showcasing a nude figure behind shattered glass. Her installation 'The Room of Lyolya Yefremova' (2020) invited one visitor at a time to explore a fictional artist's space. Her 2021 film includes a mockumentary element where she humorously interacts with a political statue. Kavelina’s communal approach showcases production artifacts along with her videos. Her ongoing project, 'It can’t be that nothing that can be returned' (2022), imagines a utopian, borderless Ukraine, ruled by AI modeled on Soviet cyberneticist Victor Glushkov, featuring surreal visuals like eyeballs on a conveyor belt. She graduated from the National Technical University of Ukraine and now lives in Berlin. Her feature film was presented at the BFI London Film Festival in 2023.