Lesia Maruschak: Project MARIA
© Lesia Maruschak
Artist Statement
Project MARIA memorializes the millions of victims of the 1932-33 famine in Soviet Ukraine – an event widely thought to be genocidal. While the number of victims is a highly debated point, it is clear that the famine was political and intentional: a state-sponsored assault on a single ethnic group as part of the Soviet Union’s new socio-economic model that required the subjugation of a sizable population whose national consciousness stood in the way of the new order.
Produced across platforms including books, installations, textile sculptures, performance, lectures and film, the project manifests my intellectual and emotional response, informed by current research and the stories shared by survivors. I knew three. I have never forgotten the stories one survivor told me as I was a growing up on the Canadian prairies. She was a youth during the famine and described a gnawing hunger and how she resorted to eating the soles of her shoes, to survive. These images and feelings have never left me. I read witness testimonies including that of Tetiana. She recalled that her sister, “had a large, swollen stomach, and her neck was long and thin like a bird’s neck. People didn’t look like people — they were more like starving ghosts.” These accounts made such an impression on my young mind and I’ve carried them with me throughout my entire life as I searched for my identity as a Canadian of Ukrainian descent.
This multi-media art installation manifests my decolonization of this historical narrative. Project MARIA will be exhibited internationally over a five-year period and as a mobile art platform it is designed to move between and across national, cultural and political borders.
© Lesia Maruschak