Russian Curator to Revise Texts for Berlin Show After Being Accused of Appropriating Ukrainian Poetry

A Russian-born curator said she would change her texts for a two-museum Berlin exhibition about art and persecution after online critics claimed that she had distorted the narrative around the war in Ukraine.

The exhibition, titled “The Assault of the Present on the Rest of Time. Artistic Testimonies of War and Repression,” is curated by Katya Inozemtseva and is now taking place at the Brücke Museum and the Schinkel Pavillon.

Per its description, the show is about “historical and contemporary positions that address state violence and repression.” Participants range from Nazi-persecuted German artists of the 1930s and ’40s, among them Dora Bromberger and Felix Nussbaum, to contemporary artists dealing with art as a form of testimony, such as the Jordanian-born Lawrence Abu Hamdan and the Ukrainian-born Dana Kavelina.

The show opened on September 15 during Berlin Art Week, one of the prime slots for the art scene of the German capital, and almost immediately received criticism on X, where thousands of users liked a thread about “The Assault of the Present on the Rest of Time” by Maksym Eristavi, a Ukrainian journalist whose biography describes his focus as “Russian colonialism.”

Eristavi focused in particular on Inozemtseva’s booklet for the show, which states that she dedicated the exhibition to Victoria Amelina, a Ukrainian poet who died earlier this year at 37 after being wounded during a Russian missile strike.

The exhibition’s booklet reprints an Amelina poem about writing during wartime. Eristavi called this an instance in which Inozemtseva “steals and appropriates” Amelina’s words, “despite that Amelina was explicitly for boycott of collabs with russian citizens.”

He also highlighted sentences in which Inozemtseva writes that the war in Ukraine began on February 24, 2022, and is ongoing. In fact, Eristavi wrote, the conflict should be backdated to 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea, which many countries, including the US, still recognize as a region in Ukraine. And, he said, the show was guilty of “appropriating and abusing Ukrainian art,” taking its name from a piece by Alexander Kluge, an artist who signed a letter in support of a German ban on sending more weaponry to Ukraine.

As Eristavi’s thread made the rounds on X, some users fixated on Inozemtseva’s career, which included a stint as the chief curator of the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow. She left Russia in March 2022, telling the Art Newspaper that Russia was “a rare and destructive machine for all living things, which are forced to hide, learn to be silent, leave and take pills.”

In a lengthy statement on Monday, Inozemtseva admitted that her discussion of the war “requires clarification.” She wrote, “In 2014, Crimea was violently annexed and the Donbass was occupied – events that prepared the ground for a protracted and unrelenting state of war. The full-scale invasion of Ukraine is thus a litany of war crimes, acts of genocide and the devastating impact of ecocide.”

She went on to respond to the allegations concerning Amelina’s writing, which she said she had encountered prior to February 2022: “Amelina’s poetry left an indelible mark on me. However, I have come to recognize that the act of reading her work and quoting or reproducing it exist on fundamentally different planes. Since it has been misconstrued as an act of unwarranted appropriation, we have decided to reissue the booklet without Victoria Amelina’s texts.” (At this time of writing, however, both the German- and English-language versions of the exhibition’s booklet available online remain unaltered.)

In a statement, the Brücke Museum and the Schinkel Pavillon said, “Both institutions and the curator stand in solidarity against all forms of state violence and repression.”

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has spurred many museums to rename artworks and reclassify artists formerly said to be Russians. In at least one other case, these texts have spurred controversy. Earlier this year, the Museum of Modern Art in New York edited a wall text for a Frances Stark video installation after an online outcry over the way it described protests in Ukraine in 2013.