As advancing peace talks shed a brighter light on the plight of the Ukrainians enduring the ravages of an over three-year war, nearly four million remain internally displaced, and seven million live as refugees across Europe. The country’s 50-million population in 1991 had already dipped to less than 40 million before the Russian invasion. Russia now occupies 20 percent of Ukraine’s territory–including the Crimean Peninsula, which it annexed in 2014, and significant portions of the Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk, and Zaporizhzhia regions.

The exiled Ukrainian artist Olena Kulishova now lives in Finland. The Kharkiv-native and “futuro” spatial designer left behind her 30-year professional life as an award-winning interior designer and architect, and her doctoral dissertation unfinished, and fled to Finland in June of 2022.

“We were completely unprepared for the sudden military aggression of the Russian Federation against Ukraine. No one planned to emigrate, was ready for war, or to flee their homes. We have now lived through the trauma of forced exile and the difficulties of survival. As a Ukrainian citizen who fled the war, I am deeply moved and concerned by themes of war, loss of home, and taking refuge in a foreign land,” says Kulishova, whose north-eastern frontline home city of Kharkiv, some 30 kilometers from the Russian border, has seen over half of its two million population decrease. She never imagined the war “would drag on for so long and be so bloody.”

Kulishova’s journey to Finland began without her husband, since Ukraine’s strict mobilization rules prohibit most military-aged men from leaving. Her first visit to Finland in 2007 was alongside leading Ukrainian architects and designers – she returned in 2022 as a war refugee, along with her ailing 81-year-old mother. Her daughter Kateryna and other family members had fled to Helsinki earlier. Kulishova and her mother were settled in the south-eastern city of Imatra, a tourist destination popularized by Russian Empress Catherine II’s visit in 1772, which transformed into a ghost town post-COVID, and when the border with Russia closed following the start of the Ukraine war.

Kulishova is a graduate of the 150-year-old Kharkiv State Academy of Design and Arts (KhSADA), founded by Maria Raevska-Ivanova who helped shape Kharkiv’s art and design education. Majoring in futuristic Industrial Design Studies shaped Kulishova’s unique perspective on the arts’ societal role.

“We were taught project thinking, a system of analysis and selection, and project management, which allows versatile work in all artistic media. Although academic drawing wasn’t the main discipline for designers, we had over 1,300 hours of drawing training and over 800 hours of academic painting.” Kulishova’s artistic works span drawing, graphics, spatial design, and painting, with works in private collections throughout Europe, India, and the U.S. A Union of Designers of Ukraine member, the Ornamo Designers’ Association in Finland named Kulishova the “2023 Person of the Year.”

While an exilic life is challenging, enrolling in a Finnish language course, surrounded by other Ukrainian refugees, helped Kulishova from sinking into depression. Communicating in her own language with fellow compatriots helped, but “intense stress and health issues,” hindered learning Finnish despite her genuine interest in her adopted country. In August 2022, Kulishova created her Telegram channel as an information hub for Ukrainian war refugees about Finnish society, traditions, and related global news.

She also immersed herself in creating a series of portraits of Ukrainian refugees living in Finland titled Saved by Finland, first exhibited in October 2022 at ArtWeek Imatra.

“The project aimed to call for peace and declare ‘war on war.’ It exposed the horrors of militarism and authoritarianism and allowed Ukrainians and Finns to see each other and establish dialogue between our peoples. It was also a call to end military aggression against Ukraine, stop the war, and prevent further deaths and destruction.”

Kulishova’s work, exhibited throughout Finland, was supported by Artists at Risk.

“It was important to use the portraits to help Ukrainian refugees overcome inner turmoil, confusion, despair, and preserve themselves and their self-esteem, having experienced war, overcoming and convincing themselves to continue living, creating, even developing professional careers, and participating in cultural, ideological interactions.”

Portrait models seeing their images on exhibit, Kulishova says, “regained their integrity, began to gather strength, and lift their spirits.” Each portrait provided background information about the subject, affirming the refugees as “highly educated and hard-working people who had contributed great efforts to the prosperity of Ukraine.”

Finland’s high unemployment (10%) and declining social standards at times lead to discrimination against visiting artists, and national minorities from Ukraine based on cultural and language differences.

She and her artist daughter, Kateryna Harahulia, faced obstacles in obtaining permission to create a large mural in the interior of the Imatra Central Station railway. The project, eventually supported by the local municipal deputies and population, reflects nature-themed murals of the endangered Saimaa seals on the station walls, helping uplift the dilapidated site.

Over the years, Olena Kulishova and Kateryna Harahulia have collaborated on artistic and cultural events to uplift the Ukrainian refugees in Finland, while familiarizing the Finns with Ukrainian cultural heritage. They organized a New Year celebration in Imatra, reflecting “the spirit of Ukrainian traditions and rituals for children and adults and enlisting other refugees and the local community organizations.

In January 2023, they organized the first “Ukrainian Sunday” in Helsinki with support from the Finnish-Swedish NGO, Ad Astra, which supports equity, minority culture, and interfaith dialogue, where Kulishova’s daughter leads the “Ad Astra for Ukrainians” program. Over the last three years, they have hosted Ukrainian children and adult creative events, including master classes on Ukrainian craft traditions, and a large-scale Ukrainian Children’s Festival, with master classes on Archaeoastronomy, exploring how past cultures understood, used, and integrated celestial phenomena into their lives and belief systems, and other various workshops based on Ukraine’s rich cultural heritages.

With support from Artist at Risk, Tampere Artist’s Association and the Helsinki International Artist Program (HIAP), the two also participated in a competitive exhibition in 2023 at Tampere, Pinninkatu 47 demolition art house, creating the immersive art project Myrskylintu, the stormbird. Using installations, graphics, and collages, the mother-daughter team recreated fragments of a war-torn Ukraine with images and thematic murals that “immersed viewers in the atmosphere and mood within a special physical environment.”

The three-month-long exhibit drew over 20 thousand visitors and included Kulishova’s “Saved by Finland” portraits and Harahulia’s “Revelation” graphic series.

“The exhibit insightfully reflected the realities of the ongoing war, the sacrifices and suffering of civilians, especially children, the horrors of the weapons, and the inhumanity and cruelty. It also showed the thin and fragile line, the wall, that separates the world from war. It was a warning from us, the Ukrainian refugees, to the whole world: to cherish and preserve peaceful life on the planet, because we are all one step away from the abyss, judging by the hands on the Doomsday Clock,” says Kulishova.

The difficulties of life in exile in Finland haven’t resolved in the past three years, says Kulishova, whose lack of fluency in Finnish hinders her employment possibilities as a professional designer.

With the deadliest war in Europe since World War II ongoing in Ukraine, Kulishova’s first and foremost concern is to provide emotional support to refugee children “in a language they understand, and in an extracurricular educational setting.” Organizing engaging arts and cultural activities, she hopes the children can grasp, expand, and build connections to their “native cultural traditions and values,” and be creative in a safe space while adapting to “their new living conditions.”

“Arts and culture are the most effective methods for successful adaptation. In art lessons for Ukrainian refugee children, I use methods to shape the creative personalities of the teenagers,” Kulishova says the initiative rehabilitates Ukrainian children and teenagers from the horrors of war, safeguarding them from intense bullying in Finnish schools and supporting them to “partially compensate for all the stresses they experience” by using art therapy to “allow children to gain self-confidence.”

Her creative approach of “big-picture thinking and a deep understanding of humanity`s artistic heritage” helps explore works from the past along with modern trends to find her distinct visual language to express emotions and convey ideas.

“My paintings explore the eternal themes of good and evil, the struggle of the human spirit for new heights, and human development, and humanity as a whole. My audience is people of all ages who have sufficient erudition and empathy to decipher the symbols and meanings of my works, and the ability to feel the beauty and energy of my canvases. My inspiration comes from my belief in the power of humanity, in the intelligence of humanity.”

Kulishova hopes her art will awaken an awareness of the “causes of the processes taking place, and the possibility of overcoming global problems and averting the inevitability of an impending nuclear catastrophe and World War III.” In actively engaging her viewer in dialogue, she hopes her art will be “food for thought about the point in the development of civilization at which we all find ourselves.”

“Feelings and thoughts about my homeland in exile are connected with the entire path I have travelled in life and the difficulties of realizing my potential in a foreign land: so as not to waste years away from home and not to be ‘on hold’ waiting for the war to end, I try to realize my potential and express it in my paintings and graphic works, to develop and deepen forms of artistic expression, and to master new artistic techniques. And although the main value of Ukraine is the Ukrainians themselves–their talents, their knowledge, their skills and experience–but away from their homeland, from their mental and linguistic environment, almost all of us experience the torment and suffering of isolation, alienation from the surrounding world, a break in emotional ties, and the inner pain associated with living in a foreign country,” Kulishova says.

As Kulishova continues to apply for grants to support exhibitions, community, and educational projects for children and adults, the prospects of returning home are “rather illusory.” Peace will be temporary and “flare up again with renewed vigour,” and returning to her war-torn city is “frightening,” as she envisions “a devastated, mined territory with destroyed enterprises, housing, and infrastructure with higher food prices.” This will make life “hopelessly difficult” and foster “rampant banditry.”

Her message to those unaware of the long-term consequences of war:

“Do everything in your power to ensure that no one is ever allowed to start military conflicts and wars. The consequences of war are terrible. Along with a destroyed country, economy, businesses, lives, and destinies, there are wounded and maimed people. Even worse, the emotional and psychological traumas cannot be replaced by any prosthetics. The PTSD among soldiers, and residents of frontline territories, boundless grief over the loss of loved ones, fear and psychological trauma among children, depopulated cities and towns, and the loss of all hope and expectations for something bright and positive,” Kulishova underscores how the raging economic crisis, and the associated contradictions, fail to inspire hope or a positive scenario. “In such an era of war, it’s an inevitable consequence of accumulated disagreements and the impossibility of resolving everything peacefully.”