'There's a very good bomb shelter in the building where I have my studio...'
Sana Shahmuradova Studio, IMMA Production Residency Partnership with EVA International, April 2023. Picture: Louis Haugh
Sana Shahmuradova Tanska is speaking via Zoom from her studio in Kyiv — the city that famously resisted the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, has been bombarded with missiles on any number of occasions since, and it seems there is no end to the conflict in sight.
Tanska says: “We’ve kind of adjusted. It’s been quiet for weeks, but we don’t know what to expect. There may be more shelling of infrastructure, like there was last year. In this particular building, where I have my studio, there’s a very good bomb shelter. It was prepared for nuclear attack during the Cold War. We’re surrounded by posters from those times. It’s very dystopian, but it serves us well. Once we hear the sirens, people from all over the neighbourhood come here, and we all just sit and wait to see what happens.”
Tanska is currently a featured artist at the EVA International Biennial in Limerick, showing a suite of figurative paintings she completed on a two-month residency at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin earlier this year.
“I didn’t really know what to expect when I was on my way to Dublin,” she says. “It’s so distant and I’d never been before. But I always had this dream of visiting Ireland because of the beautiful landscapes and the mythology and history. It all went very smoothly. The studio space was great. The IMMA team was great. And so was EVA.”
She found many similarities between Ireland and Ukraine, including the experience of colonialism, famine, and emigration, which she has tackled in her paintings. “It’s always a slippery road when you’re trying to compare the histories of different countries,” she says, “so I tried to work very intuitively. I visited Kilmainham Prison and all the museums I could find. I’d go to pubs and talk to random people. Older people, mostly, just to hear actual stories and draw parallels to what people of this generation would talk about in Ukraine.
“I was on a kind of search for the Irish language. That’s a big problem we’re trying to deal with here, trying to preserve the Ukrainian language, and I didn’t know if that’s something Irish people care about. One historian told me the Irish language is based on landscape; it’s landscape descriptive, and very poetic, and that’s something we can say about the Ukrainian language as well.”
Much as she enjoyed Dublin, Tanska was never tempted to stay. Despite the war with Russia rumbling on for close to two years now, there is, she says, a thriving arts community in Kyiv that she is happy to belong to: “Artists, filmmakers, writers; everyone is connected. I have friends who joined the armed forces at the very beginning of the war, and others who are joining now. Everything we create here we use to generate money for those on the frontline and those territories that are under occupation. It’s very difficult, but we’re doing our best.”
Tanska only settled in Kyiv in 2020. Having grown up in Odessa, 300 miles to the south, she emigrated to Toronto, Canada with her family when she was 16. “It was my mother’s decision,” she says. “I had just finished high school, and I never really believed it would happen. Back then I was super patriotic, and I never really wanted to leave. But when we did emigrate, of course, I did my best to adjust.”
In Toronto, Tanska completed a BA in Psychology at York University. “All the time I was extremely nostalgic for home,” she says. “But for some reason, I kept thinking I should come to Kyiv, rather than Odessa. I really connected with Kyiv, and I kept dreaming that one day I would live here. And that’s what happened. I came to Kyiv and I’ve stayed, and I’ve never regretted the decision.”
Tanska’s mother, stepfather and younger brother still live in Toronto. “But my biological father lives in Odessa, and my grandmother lives in a village in the Podillia region, between Odessa and Kyiv. My grandmother kind of raised me, she’s like my second mother. So it’s like half my family is there, and half is here.
“I go and visit my grandmother whenever I can, and I’ll go to Toronto soon, to see my family for the first time in two years. I’ll stay a month, and then I’m coming back. Of course, the war is very painful. It’s constant grief and terror. But for me, it’s harder — and more traumatic - to be anywhere else but here.”
Tanska works in her studio almost every day. “I mostly paint on canvas,” she says. “But I’m also trying to use different surfaces like wood. Sometimes I prime the wood, and sometimes I don’t. I’m trying to utilise everything I can. It’s always an experiment; I never know for sure what’s going to happen.”
Tanska insists she never made a conscious decision to become an artist: “To be honest, I was afraid of taking this path, especially being the daughter of immigrants in a super capitalistic city like Toronto. When I studied psychology, I was doing my best to adjust. It took me a while to realise that I could be an artist, but really, there’s nothing else I want to do.”
