Interview with Ukrainian Artist Nadiia Forkosh | MakersPlace Blog

To kick off our month-long celebration of women artists, we first sat down with one of the most empowered women in web3 art we know: Nadiia Forkosh. 

Nadiia, a Ukrainian artist, is currently based in a small Ukrainian town immediately bordering Romania, where she’s been since she escaped Kyiv in February 2022, at the start of the war in Ukraine. Normally someone who works across physical and digital mediums, Nadiia — having been forced out of her Kyiv studio — is lately working exclusively in digital.  

MP: What city are you in?

NF: I’m in just a small city. I live in Kyiv, but I left my home and studio in February. It’s the last city on the border of Romania. It’s just almost 20 meters and you’re on the border.

MP: Despite the war in Ukraine, your recent artistic output hasn’t turned notably darker. How would you characterize art as escape versus encouragement in dark times? 

NF: I will try to explain in the simplest way I can. The war experience isn’t something that you can imagine. You have to be there just to imagine it. I want to show people a reason to be human. If we turn to revenge, it will be impossible for artists to be artists, for humans to be truly human. 

About escaping: I’m not sure that I agree that art is an escape. Art touches reality — it should connect with reality, even if it’s rough and unpleasant. You should make sense of it and create a conceptual artwork about this reality. 

The darker pieces of mine, like a Portrait of Starvation and Revenge — it’s not bright artwork, but it’s not like “I’m scared, so I draw it.” I digest an experience, I build a concept, and then I create the artwork as a response to the reality. 

The reality can be rough, as I told you, but it can also be — at the same time — something that we leave for hope, for our kids, for ourselves, and for humanity. That’s my position. 

MP: How would you say that the war in Ukraine has affected your art in the last several months? I mean, obviously, you’re not in your studio. So there’s that component, but as far as conceptually, your subject matter?

NF: It’s influenced me, especially in understanding what I’m doing, especially in my main work connected with family, with the home, and with the things that are very important to me. 

I’m a phygital artist. I like to work with canvases, but I had to close my studio and leave Kyiv, so that’s impossible for me right now. 

What I’m doing as an artist — I help people with my profit because I know many homeless people. People who have lost everything, even down to clothes and food. So I help the families that I know. 

And I organize with my colleagues. We organized Mint for Ukraine and got profits for a maternity hospital in Kyiv to help them to buy equipment for newborn babies.  

How has it me influenced personally? Personally, it’s hard. But it’s hard…