drawings, video projections, objects

In Conflict Territory, Shumska uses academic drawing and representations of landscape to reflect on the territory of Ukraine affected by the hybrid armed conflict between 2014 and 2020. Although more than six years have passed since the project was created, its subject remains profoundly relevant. Today, the Russian-Ukrainian war – as well as other armed conflicts around the world – is increasingly mediated through social media and digital mapping platforms such as Google Maps, where real tragedies and humanitarian disasters are interwoven with memes and advertisements. At the same time, societies across the globe are losing faith in democratic values, yielding to the politics of fear and populism. The artist’s drawings are deliberately hybrid and detached from realism, combining academic draftsmanship with comic-book aesthetics, digital visual language, and absurd juxtapositions of screenshots, text fragments, and militarized symbols of war. Video projections animate the otherwise static images, layering additional visual narratives and generating shifting fields of meaning. By materializing ephemeral digital phenomena, the artist questions the impact of information and virtual content on physical space and social relations.

Presentations:

2025 – Conflict Territory, Kathedra Gallery, Academy of Fine Arts in Gdansk, Poland
2022 – Great Patriotic, Galeria BWA, Bydgoszcz, Poland
2020 – Conflict Territory, Ukrainian House in Warsaw, Poland
2020 – Draw. International Student Drawing Exhibition, Wozownia Gallery, Toruń, Poland