Following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Sana Shahmuradova Tanska’s paintings can be seen as a journal, one of necessity and resistance, where the poetry and pain of intergenerational trauma float across a war zone on an ocean of colours. Drawing upon different strands of Ukrainian history, literature, and folklore, Tanska dissolves the line between form and mirage. She summons figures of the imagination and of nightmares, emerging from the landscape of collective memory, grief, and continuous violence. In many of her works, such as the ones rooted in her ancestral Podillia region, she observes human-made changes in the natural landscape and how these mirror the fading historical and cultural memories in the country, shaped by repeated episodes of political oppression, particularly during the Soviet period. In another series, she draws from the history and the current state of the Black Sea and the southern region of Ukraine, subjected to ecocide by the Russian aggressors. These works are populated by imaginary deep-sea creatures who might carry the memory of past events while also being able to survive upcoming catastrophes. For the artist, time moves circularly rather than linearly, which is starkly visible in the generational retraumatization currently unfolding in Ukraine. In this cycle, there are no fundamentally new myths; the same ones are recast and acquire a new shell. Eventually, there is an exchange of the ghosts of the past and the future.

Negotiations commissioned by Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), co-produced by Sana Shahmuradova Tanska, Gunia Nowik Gallery, and HKW, 2025

Works in the exhibition: A Danse Macabre (2024), oil on canvas, 120 × 130 cm; Water Search (2024), oil on canvas, 158 × 132 cm; Failed mental map (2024), oil on canvas, 128 × 118 cm; Inevitable Path (2025), oil on canvas, 202 × 159 cm; Negotiations (2025), oil on canvas, 163 × 215 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Gunia Nowik Gallery