Produced in partnership with the Office of the President of Ukraine and the PinchukArtCentre, this publication was released on the occasion of the 2022 Venice Biennale exhibition

This Is Ukraine: Defending Freedom. It is the seventh issue of the series Isolarii—meaning “island texts”—and is titled In the Face of War.

At its center is Yevgenia Belorusets’s war diary, written during the Russian invasion of Ukraine, presented alongside monumental works by Nikita Kadan and Lesia Khomenko. The three artists continue to live and work in wartime Ukraine, confronting the daily reality of violence while reflecting on the question of what art can do in the face of war.

Afterwords by Timothy Snyder, Yuval Noah Harari, and Nan Goldin situate the project within a broader historical and political context. As one text in the publication notes, the young artists gathered here face the constant presence of death and its consequences, yet seek to preserve the incomprehensibility of war—opening the possibility that history might follow a different path than the one intended by its perpetrators.