All participants share the experience of translating the War Vocabulary – a book complied by Ostap Slyvynsky – or publishing it in other languages. This collection combines fiction, non-fiction and lexicography, and constitutes an attempt to make up the linguistic picture of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine from the extracts of its witnesses’ stories. Each story reveals the shift of usual words’ meanings in the new reality of war. But it’s during the translation process that the problem of inequitability of war and peace experiences of language appears as even more urgent. What new levels and dimensions of untranslatability do translators have to deal with while attempting to convey a war text in languages of cultures whose war experience has remained in the distant past? What can we understand of our own war when seeing it in the mirror of other languages?

The war changes everything, including spaces for communication. Other registers and forms of public speech, other rules and standards emerge. Other “default” restrictions and prohibitions break or set taboos against certain linguistic manifestations. The never-ending stream of linguistic creativity is fascinating but warning, since it reveals gaps in which old senses sink and new ones arise. This is a conversation about what’s happening in public discourse, how do the media change and impact on us, how is our language refracted and what is revealed in these “folds”.

Within the time of war, we do not just create and master new levels of language but stand still in front of what can never be put into words. Silence is eloquent, nonetheless, and what is silenced can still speak. Figures of silence replace those of speech, while the speech itself grows numb facing the horrors of war. What is the role of these lacunae in our attempts to comprehend our experience? How do we work with silence, with things untold and unfit to speak of? What dangers await us on our way to express our war experiences? How do we heal our wounds? And is it, after all always necessary to break the silence?

What can literature do in the presence of war experience? Is it capable of comforting, healing wounds, or opposing itself to boundless disappointment and despair brought by the war? Literature is an extremely subjective form of writing; however, since the war has broken out, it gains new social responsibilities. How is it supposed to deal with them? Or with fury, hatred, and urge for revenge? How is art supposed to keep its integrity in the presence of war experience? And could art and literature of wartime probably give a lesson or convey some valuable insights to those bound to live through the troubled war times in the future?

Ukrainian voices became better heard when people noticed the explosions and unmuted the sound. Today, the world has no right to ignore them, even though it is not in the rush to revise the colonial views on t ‘big’ and ‘small’ cultures shaped by the imperial world[1]view. Ukraine has been emerging from the shadow of empires long and painfully, and it is now that it has a chance to gain the covet[1]ed d cultural voice and agency, which until now needed to be proved not only to the world,but also inside the country.

Art has always been responsive to such processes. In recent decades, Ukrainian artists have not only been reflecting on the shared state of uncertainty, insecurity, and voicelessness, but they also have been looking for different ways to find the proper words and the opportunity to speak up. The works presented in this project are a reflection of our feelings, perceptions, and rethinking, which brings us closer to understanding ourselves and helps to articulate it to the world.

Launched in 2010, UKRAINIAN CROSS-SECTION is a triennial of contemporary Ukrainian art. The initial mission was to present Ukrainian art to the world. Since then, the project has been implemented in Lublin, Wroclaw (the European Capital of Culture 2016), Kaunas (the European Capital of Culture 2022) and Lviv.

The 5th triennial was an attempt to capture what Ukrainian art looks like now, in times when the realities of Ukrainians are largely determined by the war, and the unprecedented aggression, the aggression the world hasn’t seen since World War II that is happening next to them and threatening them every moment.