Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Leviza Nikulina. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Leviza, appreciate you joining us today. What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?

During my artistic career, I have had several important projects of my own. All of them were in one way or another dedicated to the theme of a lost home, violence, or war. I am an artist from Ukraine, and to be more precise, from the city of Donetsk. My hometown has been occupied since 2014, and this has had a huge impact on the formation of my style and the ideas I put into my paintings.

I started one of the most important projects in 2022, right after the start of the full-scale war in Ukraine. It was dedicated to the cities of my country that had suffered significant damage from missile attacks. But of course, just showing the destroyed houses is not enough to understand what their residents are going through. So I took photos of my friends who were born and lived in these cities and painted portraits of them, inscribed in the landscape of their destroyed cities. After that, the project was called “A face on the city.” It includes paintings of Kharkiv, Donetsk, Dnipro, and other cities of Ukraine.

In my opinion, this project is important because I don’t talk about it as in “the nation is suffering,” because this is an abstraction, a generalization. I say: “Every single person is suffering, you can look at their face. These are all different faces, different destinies, but the pain is the same. Their cities, like their faces, look different. But they are all united by the same destruction of streets and buildings.” I hope this helps the world to understand my nation.

Leviza, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

For a long time (until 2021) I’d been living in Donetsk and studying to be a journalist, but even then I realized that my future profession would be more related to art than journalism. I was actively involved in poetry, ran a creative association, and started drawing my first illustrations for it, but I didn’t have any money to do this. For a long time, it was difficult for me to call myself an artist. Although I had been drawing since childhood, I had no art education, so it seemed like I had no reason to call myself an artist. But after I was able to move out of the occupied city, my whole mindset changed.

In 2021, I moved from Donetsk to Kharkiv, one of the largest cities in Ukraine. It was before the start of the full-scale war, so most people in Kharkiv had little knowledge of the life of the neighboring occupied city, the life of people from Donbas. It was then that I realized that through my art I would be able to tell other people in the country about my experience, about the war and the problems of people who are unable to leave the occupied cities. After that, I started painting my first art digital project, “It’s Not Her Problems.” It was dedicated to the experience of women living under occupation. Through this project, I tried to explain why the occupation might be less of a problem for someone because these women faced violence, the death of their relatives, and serious illnesses. After that, the occupation of their city might not seem like the biggest catastrophe in the world. At the time of creating this project, I didn’t know that in six months many Ukrainians would have a similar experience.

My first project, although it was not, in my opinion, successfully implemented, made me realize that I can call myself an artist. I have ideas, and I have a way of expressing them, so why not turn it into a real job? Then I received an offer to become an illustrator for a Kharkiv-based company that was engaged in NFT projects. These projects were dedicated to environmental problems, so I mostly drew collections of animals, landscapes, and everything related to the environment. It was my first creative job with a real stable salary.

After February 24, 2022, everything changed when Russia attacked my country. Kharkiv was under bombardment from the first day, so I had to urgently evacuate to Lviv, a safer city in Ukraine. There I decided to close the project about women because it had lost relevance for me. At the same time, the company I was working for sent me to another NFT project, which was already related to the war and volunteering. I started drawing illustrations about world dictators and their crimes against humanity. My company donated all the money from this project to humanitarian aid or donations for our army. Later, these illustrations were also published in the Ukrainian magazine “+-Infinity” about art in war.

At the same time, I started my second art project, “Air Dreams”. These were paintings on canvases with acrylic paint using fabric, clay, and other improvised materials. All of them were dedicated to the terrible nightmares that a person sees when he or she has just woken up in the middle of the night from an air alarm and does not know what to do for the first few seconds. It is difficult to explain this state in words to those who have not had such an experience. But when a dream turns into reality with the sound of an air raid alarm and a life-threatening situation, these are the unique emotions I tried to convey. This project was much more successful than the last one, and I had several solo and collaborative exhibitions in Lviv galleries, and one of my paintings was published in a zine by one of the galleries.

Now I am working on my third digital project “Last impressions of visualizing (something. home)”. It is entirely dedicated to the theme of home, which I and a significant number of Ukrainians lost since we were forced to move to other cities in Ukraine or evacuate to other countries. I am inspired by the history of our struggle, our language and culture, and our incredibly strong Ukrainians. Every single person I meet in this country has a unique experience of living through this war, so I, as an observer, try to capture these stories in my paintings. Although the project is not yet finished, I have already sold some of the paintings from it in Ukraine or Germany. Also, very soon, a joint exhibition with other Ukrainian artists will be held in Kharkiv, where I will exhibit my paintings from “Last Impressions….» for the first time.

Have you ever had to pivot?

After the start of the full-scale war in Ukraine, I had to change my whole life, there was no other choice. The city I chose to live and work in became very dangerous. I was forced to evacuate from Kharkiv with one bag five days after the Russian attack. Of course, I couldn’t take my canvases, paints, and finished paintings with me. All this remained in Kharkiv under the threat of destruction. But, fortunately, all my things were saved, so a few months later I was able to take them to Lviv.

It’s hard to name a single aspect of my life that hasn’t changed. When the war started, I realized that all my projects that I had prepared before were no longer relevant. I realized that all my moral principles had been destroyed, and my worldview had changed forever. All the topics that had inspired me before no longer mattered. It may sound pretentious, but it is true. I had to become a new person with new creativity and new meanings, create my own personality from scratch and rethink what I had been doing all my life. 
At the same time, I am sure that this experience has made me an incredibly strong person. Yes, I lost a lot of things I loved, lost some friends and my hometown, but I was able to find my new way, come up with new, relevant projects, and paint dozens of new paintings that tell people about my experience of living in war.

What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?

Now I understand that it is absolutely normal not to have one specific creative goal for the rest of your life. It’s normal to change goals, change meanings, change views on art and life. But at the same time, I can say that right now I have a concrete goal. I want to capture the experiences and emotions that Ukrainians are going through right now. Through my paintings, I want to tell about this experience to the widest possible audience. To tell about people’s fears, their hopes and dreams. When the war in Ukraine ends, I will have to change the goals and meanings of my work again. Perhaps I’ll move on to sublimation and rethinking the events of recent years. I am ready for this and this is my greatest desire in life. But now, while the war is still ongoing, I know that I have to capture the memory of it in my paintings, to fix every emotion I experienced, because it is unique and will never happen again outside of war. This is my main goal today.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/_levizion_/
• Other: https://www.behance.net/levizionN