digital collage, print on canvas, 180×400 cm, and video collage 2’10”

Link to video: https://youtu.be/Fv4EnIKIHXY

The work is a contemporary homage to Pablo Picasso’s Guernica, engaging with the experience of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. It examines the continuing relevance of one of the twentieth century’s most iconic anti-war paintings and asks what it means to reinterpret such a work today.

Using digital montage, Shumska juxtaposes documentary materials, quotations from social media, and algorithmically generated images. The resulting work – presented as both a large-scale print and a video – confronts historical memory with images of contemporary warfare, reflecting on the recurring nature of violence, the role of the media, and the status of the image in the age of digital reproduction.

As an artist from Irpin, a city temporarily occupied by Russian forces in 2022, Shumska also gives the work a deeply personal dimension, raising the question of whether new anti-war icons can still emerge in the twenty-first century.

Presentations:

2025 – Between the (Un)imaginable and the Real, CSW Łaźnia, Gdańsk, Poland
2024 – 100 Years in Labirynt – Open Space, Galeria Labirynt, Lublin, Poland
2023 – War(n), WL4, Gdańsk, Poland
2023 – „Guernica 1937 – Ukraine 2022”, Galeria w Ruchu, Gdańsk, Poland