Cover photo: Marichka Shtyrbulova, opera GENESIS. Kyiv, Khanenko Museum, 2022 Photo by Nastya Telikova
Art against Artillery: Voices of Resilience is a 2025 book by Ukrainian journalist Olha Volynska, produced together with Kilden Performing Arts Centre and the Association of Norwegian Theatres and Orchestras (NTO). Through a series of first‑person testimonies, the book documents how Ukrainian artists transform culture into a means of survival, resistance and truth‑telling under full‑scale Russian aggression. For a platform like Mimeta Memos, which tracks how artistic freedom is constrained and defended in conflict, the book offers both evidence and language for understanding culture as a frontline in its own right.
A cultural frontline under fire
At the heart of the book are stories from musicians, theatre makers, curators, writers and cultural workers who continue to create amid shelling, displacement and systematic attacks on cultural infrastructure. Volynska’s interviewees describe how concerts, exhibitions and performances become safe spaces for processing trauma, holding communities together and refusing the narrative that Ukraine is merely a battlefield rather than a living cultural space. Culture is no longer “just” art; it is a way of defending dignity, memory and the basic right to exist as a people.
Documenting cultural destruction
The backdrop is a campaign of cultural destruction that Ukrainian institutions. Volynska notes that since the full‑scale invasion, Russian forces have destroyed or damaged hundreds of cultural sites, looted museums and targeted archives, echoing earlier Soviet attempts to erase Ukrainian language and identity. By juxtaposing historical references with contemporary testimonies, the book draws a line from earlier waves of repression, such as the “Executed Renaissance” of the 1930s, to today’s persecution and killing of artists, writers and cultural workers.
Voices of resilience
The testimonies collected in Art against Artillery show artists insisting on performing, publishing and exhibiting even when their work is created in basements, shelters or exile. Volynska foregrounds their words to highlight how art functions as psychological first aid, a tool for collective mourning and a means of preserving truth in the face of propaganda and denial. The result is a portrait of a cultural field that is wounded yet radically honest, where, as one filmmaker notes, “falsehood is no longer forgiven, especially in art”.
how cultural policy, censorship and violence intersect
The book speaks directly to concerns about how cultural policy, censorship and violence intersect. It makes visible that violations of artistic freedom are not only abstract restrictions on expression but also the physical destruction of venues, rehearsal spaces, libraries and lives. At the same time, the stories assemble a casebook of strategies, formal and informal, through which artists defend their space to speak, create and remember under extreme pressure.
An invitation to solidarity
Volynska’s narrative voice is both journalistic and deeply personal, allowing the book to function as documentation, testimony and call to action. In their foreword, Kilden’s Harald Furre and NTO’s Morten Gjelten stress that these realities are far removed from the everyday challenges of Nordic cultural institutions, yet central to understanding what is at stake when European values are invoked. Art against Artillery becomes an invitation to deepen transnational solidarity with those who continue to create under fire, and to treat cultural resilience as a core concern of human rights work.
Olha Volynska is a Ukrainian journalist, author and documentary filmmaker from Dnipro with more than 15 years of experience in television and online media. Her work focuses on human rights, war and memory, and she has reported extensively on how Russian aggression affects civilians and cultural life in Ukraine. Volynska is a multi‑award‑winning storyteller, a human rights advocate and the author. She also works with documentary film projects on civilian hostages and trauma, using narrative to create space for dialogue and international solidarity with Ukraine.[iwpr]
The ebook Art against Artillery: Voices of Resilience brings together interviews with a broad spectrum of Ukrainian cultural workers, including theatre directors, musicians, composers, curators and other figures from the performing and visual arts. [kilden]
How does art survive artillery fire?
In Art against Artillery: Voices of Resilience, Ukrainian journalist Olha Volynska gathers testimonies from artists, musicians, theatre makers and cultural workers who keep creating under bombardment, occupation and displacement. The book shows how stages, galleries and rehearsal rooms become frontline spaces for healing, resistance and the defence of memory.
This is essential reading on how artistic freedom is attacked and defended in wartime, and why cultural resilience must be treated as a core human rights concern, not a luxury.
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