Maria Kulikovska: My Body is a Battlefield

My Body is a Battlefield offers a comprehensive insight into the work of the Ukrainian artist Maria Kulikovska, born in Crimea in 1988. Already in her early works she deals with patriarchal structures and the absence of female subjectivity in Ukrainian art. With the annexation of Crimea and the ensuing war, questions of identity and belonging and the themes of border and violence become leitmotifs of her artistic practice. Kulikovska's sculptures are exact copies of her body or individual body parts. Made of unusual materials such as ballistic soap, grease, or epoxy resin, the casts are subject to processes of aging and decay, are modified, transformed, and deconstructed. In her watercolors and drawings, created as series, for example on medical reports and authority forms, she designs bodies that resist the markings and boundaries of the paper as much as the bureaucratic constraints and gender fixations formulated there. Her ceramics-molds of severed limbs and replicas of bodily fluids-are forms of rage and despair in the face of the brutality and horrors of war. Kulikovska shows her body as a site of conflicting emotions and traumatic memories, as a contested arena of ideological attributions and warlike aggression; she asserts herself, drastically and dramatically, against gender and sexual norming, against violence and subjugation. The illustrated book was published on the occasion of the exhibition of the same name at the Francisco Carolinum in Linz, the artist's first solo exhibition in the German-speaking world.