Maria Kulikovska Resists Imperialism and Patriarchy

Maria Kulikovska’s debut exhibition in New York, Once Leda Found an Egg — Blue Like a Hyacinth, co-organized by Mriya Gallery and Rukh Art Hub, is an incisive interrogation of our limited representational paradigms afforded to the female body, specifically in the context of the artist’s own anxieties and traumas regarding her precarious embodiment after Russia annexes Crimea in 2014 and invasion of Ukraine in 2022. After losing her sense of home both physically and politically, the artist has been producing works that reanimate the feminist dictum that the personal is the political. In Kulikovska’s case, boundaries between the body politic of Ukraine under attack and her gendered and sexualized body under assault have collapsed.

Upon entering the exhibition, we see two standing epoxy resin sculptures, cast from the artist’s own pregnant body, both titled Sculpture from the Pregnant Figure series, 2024. The sculpture in the center is semi-transparent, with flowers from Kyiv and bullet shells collected from the frontline inside visible. The work is mounted on a makeshift shrine made from various plants culturally important to Ukraine. In front of the sculpture is a bathtub with a soap cast of the artist’s torso next to it, suggestive of a scene of violence—and indeed it was a remnant from a performance Lustration / Ablution conducted by the artist on the three-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. With force and resolute, the artist cleansed herself in the bathtub with a soap sculpture that replicates parts of her own body, metaphorically declaring her allegiance to the miracle of survival. Behind the transparent figure is another pregnant figure painted in gold, goodness-like, showcasing the artist’s and her homeland’s sheer will for resistance.

Quite a few works surround the sculpture. Virgin with Child, 2011, which intervenes into the surface of a Christian coverlet depicting Mary and Jesus Christ with ghostly acrylic and oil paint traces that delineate previously unseen psychical connections between the two figures, reimagines mother-child relationship as one of dependency and anticipates the artist’s own pregnancy. The Saga About Pregnant Me and About my Pregnant Husband, Drawings on the Paper Received from Migration Offices, and others, 2021 quite literally is a series of drawings of florals, pregnant bodies, reproductive organs, and scenes of intercourse and masturbation à la Maria Lassnig and Judith Bernstein on the artist’s pregnancy medical examination reports and correspondence concerned with immigration status with bureaucratic divisions of various European governments. Again, the artist’s frustration with biopolitical apparatuses that discipline female bodies and the precarious fate of Ukraine’s aspiration for European integration here become on. A carpet work asks viewers to consider in which country Kulikovska will be treated as a human being, referencing both specific conditions of manufactured death in Ukraine and universal conditions of patriarchy. We also see ceramic plates, bowls, urns, teapots, and jugs lushly painted with symbols of life and death, suggestive of how subjugation also creates an opportune occasion for the demonstration of human will toward freedom.

Working with ideas of ephemerality, fragility, and immortality, Kulikovska’s exhibition makes a grueling case for how every war is also a war on women. But victimhood is never a passive state, in fact a generative site for conceiving strategies of resistance.

Maria Kulikovska’s Once Leda Found an Egg — Blue Like a Hyacinth presented by Mriya Gallery and Rukh Art Hub was on view in New York through March 5^th, 2025 at 101 Reade Street, New York, New York, 10013.

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