An Interview with Oleksandr Klymenko
While in Kyiv in late 2018 the editor of the East-West Church Report encountered Oleksandr Klymenko, a local icon-painter. Currently unaffiliated with a particular Orthodox jurisdiction in Ukraine, during the 2014 Maidan protests Klymenko was among a small group of Moscow Patriarchate Orthodox who tried to prevent violent clashes by standing between demonstrators and police. (For some of his comments on Orthodox identity in Ukraine, see the East-West Church Report, vol. 27, no. 1, 4-6.)
Following Maidan, Klymenko became unexpectedly and intimately involved with the Donbass conflict through a project to turn its spent ammunition boxes into icons. Here, he tells the Report about this work, recently exhibited in North American as well as European cities outside Ukraine. The original conversation took place in Russian.
How did your project come about?
Special Issue: Christians and the War in Ukraine An Interview with Oleksandr Klymenko In 2014 a group of local artists organized an exhibition at one of Kyiv’s museums to aid the Kyiv Central Military Hospital. Some of the exhibits were icons, and several of them were sold. The person who purchased the icons decided to give one of them to a military unit so that the soldiers, alongside having to defend their country, might think about God. That is more important than anything else, after all. It was not my icon, but— being one of the exhibitors—I went along to where this military unit was based. There I was struck by a huge mountain of boxes left over from ammunition for Kalashnikov assault rifles: Everyone knows that terrible symbol of murder, responsible for killing all over the world in the 20th and early 21st centuries. I noticed that the wooden boards from which the boxes were made were very similar to the wooden boards used to paint icons. I picked up one of these boards and asked the soldiers, “What do you do with these?” They told me, “We use them as stools and chairs, or else we burn them.” So I took one board and painted my first icon on it—a Byzantine icon of the Mother of God. I thought that a Byzantine icon would sit very well on this dark, shabby board.
From this, the idea for the project arose. I suggested it to two artists: my wife, Sofia Atlantova, and Natalia Volobueva, who is no longer involved due to time pressures. At that stage it was just an art project, in which the language of the ancient icon—which has existed in Ukraine for more than a thousand years and so is readily understood by Ukrainians—could speak about modern warfare. The key idea arose at once: the transformation of death, of which weaponry is a symbol, into life, of which the icon is a symbol in Ukrainian culture. Icons only became possible after the Resurrection of Christ—the embodiment of victory over death. Transforming symbols of death into life also belongs to the Christian tradition, as Christ turned the cross—a symbol of death, of ganebnist’ [Ukrainian: disgrace]—into the symbol of Resurrection. I understand this as a pacifist project. It shows that life conquers death, that good conquers evil; an icon can testify to this.
We prepared for several months— this was at the time of heavy fighting in the town of Debaltseve [January-February 2015]—before opening an exhibition at St. Sophia’s Cathedral in Kyiv later that winter. [Founded in the 11th century,] St. Sophia’s is one of the oldest churches in Ukraine, and so we tried to show where the tradition of icon-painting originated and where it had come—a kind of dialogue.
How do the icons reference the war?
It was very important to me in the context of this project that these icons have come from the front. These boards were all in battle; they were all at the front. They are witnesses to this terrible war, where boxes of shells and all kinds of armaments are being used. When you go there, you hear artillery fire for days—Boom! Boom! Boom! It is scary. I have tried to convey the subject of frontline combat to people elsewhere in Ukraine and other parts of the world, so that they would see that this war is still going on. Every few days someone is killed, whether combatant or civilian. In this way, I hope to bring people out of the virtual experience of war. The internet is useful, but we are starting to perceive war in virtual space, as a war game. But when you hold a wooden board from an ammunition box, you understand this war completely differently; it still smells of war. You understand that all these armaments have gone towards someone else’s death.
Another thing that is important to me is the attempt to make the soldiers who fought on the front lines—the fact that they brought these boards to me—participants in the project. As you can see, in Kyiv we do not live as during wartime. Even in Mariupol [a southeastern city close to the front] there are cafés, discos, and wedding parties. But if you travel just a few miles, there is a war going on, with dirt, soldiers, and death. And the soldiers feel forgotten: “We must be cannon fodder, and we must die.” They were really enthusiastic about being a part of this, about bringing back these ammunition boxes even while under fire. So we artists are not the only participants in this project.
How does the project assist casualties of the war?
People began to buy these works, and I decided that it would be better to give the money I earned from their sale to charity. At the start of the project, I knew of people organizing the Pirogov First Volunteer Mobile Hospital. We became close in very interesting circumstances. Not long after my visit to the military base where I first saw these wooden boards, a monk from St. Jonah’s Monastery in Kyiv phoned me. He said, “Oleksandr, I heard you are collecting money for the hospital, and I have money here.” So I went to see him, thinking maybe he would give me 1,000 or 2,000 hryvnias [under $100]. But there turned out to be a huge bag of money, about 100,000 hryvnias [nearly $4,000]. This monk said, “I left my cell this morning and was on my way to services. As I approached the church I was stopped by a stranger who did not tell me who he was. He gave me this packet of money saying, ‘Please give it to whomever needs it, people who have suffered from this war in the east.’” [For an interview with the abbot of St. Jonah’s Orthodox Monastery, see the East-West Church Report, vol. 26, no. 4, 7-9.]
A few days earlier I had read on the Facebook feed of someone I know—our paths had crossed a couple of times—that the Pirogov Volunteer Hospital needed help to buy a mobile operating theater to take to the front. So I gave this money to one of the hospital organizers, Gennadiy Druzenko. It was a Friday, and it turned out that they had to pick up a mobile operating machine that Saturday. If they did not have the money, the contract for it would be annulled, and they would not be able to travel, because it was to be their only machine. They told me that they just stood up and prayed for God’s help, because they had nothing. They had contacted everyone they could and received some money, but they still needed about 70,000 hryvnias [nearly $3,000]. It was at that point that I contacted them. I just wrote on Facebook, “Gennadiy, I have money.” Thanks to that money, they were able to buy the machine, fill up with fuel, and go to the front.
In the years since, this mobile hospital has continued to operate and is now the largest volunteer medical project in the zone of military activity. To begin with, it was a project to treat soldiers, but now it mostly helps the local population because the medical system there has been devastated. The mobile hospital has tens of thousands of patients along the line of division, from Luhansk in the north to Mariupol in the south. Around 5,000 doctors have worked for it. I understand that without our project the hospital would not exist, as we are their main sponsor.
