AGAINST ANESTHESIA: AESTHETIC MECHANISMS OF THE REANIMATION OF SENSIBILITY IN UKRAINIAN WARTIME ART

Abstract

This article examines the potential of contemporary Ukrainian art as a space for the reanimation of sensibility e. i. the restoration of the capacity to feel, perceive, and make sense of experience under conditions of protracted war. The point of departure for analysis is Susan Buck-Morss’s diagnosis of the “anaesthetics of modernity”, in which the excess of visual and sensory stimuli dulls sensory perception and substitutes lived experience with its representation. Within this framework, the article analyses how visual culture can function as a de-anaesthetising mechanism that keeps the event within the field of attention without simplifying it, normalising it, or displacing it to the symbolic periphery. The proposed analytical framework brings together two operational vectors: nominalisation (the linguistic return of meaning under conditions of semantic exhaustion and the loss of linguistic agency) and materialisation (the bodily embodiment of experience in forms that resist abstraction and repetitive sensory dulling). This perspective makes it possible to trace how artistic practices respond to the blurring of boundaries between experience and its image, between the event itself and its mediated representations. Through an analysis of Nikita Kadan’s Repeating Speech series, ateliersnormale’s project Sincere Greetings, and Maria Kulikovska’s sculpture Shot Bust with Flowers and Shell Casings, the study demonstrates how artistic gestures reanimate perceptivity: returning to language its capacity to signify, and to the image its corporeal weight, tactility, and ethical presence. Special attention is given to the ways in which the gesture of repetition, the broken or interrupted line, bodily materiality, and the very logic of trace-making become instruments of resistance to desensitisation. The article argues that under conditions of prolonged violence, visual culture is capable not only of preserving the memory of the event, but also of sustaining the capacity to discern, to empathise, and to act. Such an approach creates conditions in which sensibility does not fade but is transformed into ethical responsibility.