Vitaliia Fedorova: Ukrainian Artist on War, Identity, and Art as Political Force

Vitaliia Fedorova (Kyiv, 1996) is a Ukrainian visual artist whose practice spans political-social themes and introspection. She uses installation and video to transform personal experience into collective narrative. Fedorova left Ukraine on June 6, 2022, due to the war with Russia, relocating temporarily to the UK. She earned a psychology degree from the University of Kyiv in 2017 before studying Painting and Visual Arts at NABA in Milan. Her psychology background influences her art, particularly her video work, which she describes as inherently psychological. Her film MAVKAS (2021), screened at Filmmaker Festival and finalist at ReA! Art Fair, explores four generations of matriarchal family history, referencing the mythical MAVKA forest creatures of Ukrainian folklore. The installation Hair-Strands (2022), presented at the Alias exhibition, uses her cut hair as a tangible object to convey the reality of war, contrasting with ubiquitous war imagery. Her site-specific work Lions Liars, Papa! (2022), shown at Cassina Projects in Milan for the group show Devyanostie, features Soviet and post-Soviet newspapers from the 1990s wallpapered over, with drawings over them as a critique of propaganda. Fedorova believes art can influence and transform social processes, and she sees it as a space for free expression, especially during war.