For Ukraine’s entry in this year’s Venice Biennale, two artists asked refugees to help them create an ‘acceptable’ portrait of a woman ravaged by war. We meet the team behind an astonishing project
In a room inside a Liverpool gallery, Saskia Pay, a young British actor dressed in studiedly ordinary jeans and top, is sitting on a chair in front of a camera. The guy with the camera, Ukrainian artist Andrii Dostliev, briefs a trio of other women, all of them refugees from Ukraine, on the type of image he is trying to create. He indicates the props they can use – a foil blanket, an arm sling, a dirty teddy bear, some makeup. The women nod. They don’t need much in the way of explanation. Everyone knows this kind of picture.
Unhesitatingly they move in, wrapping the foil blanket around Pay’s shoulders. “It would be more natural if she had marks on her face,” one of them points out, and another gets to work with the makeup. Next, hair. One of the women says that when she was living under occupation – in the town of Makariv, west of Kyiv, near Bucha, which fell under Russian control at the start of the full-scale invasion – she just pulled hers into a ponytail and it went unwashed for days on end. Another observes that it would be better if the model had some blood on her face. They give her the teddy bear to clutch to her body; they give her the arm sling.
