CULTURE OF MEMORY IN ARTISTIC REFLECTIONS ON WAR (BASED ON THE PROJECT “WAR IN UKRAINE: VISUAL DIMENSIONS OF MEMORY”)

Abstract

The article is devoted to the study of the peculiarities of artistic reflections on the culture of memory in the context of the Russian-Ukrainian war. The semantic dimensions of the war are revealed in art, in the variety of expressive means of modern media, new communication practices, and theoretical studies of the phenomenon of memory in cultural and traumatic discourse. The communication project “War in Ukraine: Visual Dimensions of Memory” (based on the material of the VOLNANOVA artistic action) traces the peculiarities of the influence of artistic reflections on the interaction of individual and collective memory. The purpose of the article is to reveal the peculiarities of the culture of memory in communication projects, which is addressed to artistic reflections on the events of the Russian-Ukrainian war. The research methodology is based on cultural, axiological, and hermeneutical approaches, which allows for a very broad study of the culture of memory during the war in interdisciplinary contexts, including cultural and traumatic discourse. The scientific novelty of the study is that it characterizes the changes in the emotional and memory culture of Ukrainians during the war year, and substantiates the communicative, educational, cultural, and therapeutic role of art projects that focus on understanding war in visual images. In the course of the study, the authors concluded that in the field of visual images based on war narratives, the individual and the collective are reconciled in a dynamic communicative discourse of war trauma, which gives an impetus to reveal the existential experiences of both authors and viewers, and viewers, overcoming the regimes of silence and emotional stagnation determined by the trauma of war, promotes adaptation to new conditions of civilizational challenges, development of critical thinking and the ability to solve conceptual dilemmas in the state of the culture of war. New functions of narrative practices (extended storytelling), aesthetic practices (expression of feelings through images), and communicative practices (discussion and comparison of concepts) are gaining importance. The features of metaphorical language and the nature of the combination of different temporal and spatial dimensions of memory are studied, which represents an important change in the culture of memory of Ukrainians: the transition from expressing the emotional experience of traumatic experience to its comprehension in a concept, a broader context of individual history and collective memory. This is in line with individualism as a generic feature of Ukrainian identity and the tendencies of forming a new collectivity during the war based on a lively dialogue.