jump to navigation

Femen Activist Inna Shevchenko portrait by Guillaume Herbaut receives award at World Press Photo July 2, 2012

Posted by bohdan.warchomij in : Femen, Guillaime Herbaut, Institute for Artist Management, World Press Awards , comments closed

I have been following the activism of Femen in Ukraine on the internet with some interest and Guillaume Herbaut’s work for the Institute for Artist Management in Ukraine for some time.  The two subjects coincided at the last World Press Awards when a photo of Inna Shevchenko , one of Femen’s activists received a World Press  award that will be controversial because of the nudity. Inna has a wreathe of flowers tattooed on her body. Her salute in the photo is a militant act and as Herbaut explains to the British Journal of Photography it is an act that has defined Femen and their role in Ukrainian political life. Unmistakeably their protest is a political one. It has given them media power and credibility and impetus in their battle against sexism and political opportunism in Ukraine and Russia. The activists have been arrested many times.

“Guillaume Herbaut‘s work, called The New Amazons, has followed the Femen protest group. “Their goal is to fight sexual tourism and to educate women to be more assertive and powerful. They use their bodies as a weapon,” writes Herbaut on his site, recording the words of one of his subject: “At the beginning, we were so naive and we manifested with balloons shouting some slogans, but nobody listened us. But one day, we don’t know why, one of us, Kseniya Chatchko, undressed, and we saw that the people, the press started to see us and to listen to us.”

Speaking to BJP, Herbaut said: “I think what’s interesting is the fact that the naked body has become a militant act. We’re seeing a lot more political movements that use nakedness to expose their opinions.”

Herbaut’s image could, however, prove controversial for World Press Photo, Daphné Anglès, the award’s secretary, told BJP. “There are some countries where the exhibition won’t be able to go because of that specific image,” she says. Herbaut half expected this to happen. “I was very surprised when my agency told me that certain markets couldn’t publish these photos because the women depicted were naked. The US is one of these markets. I’m astonished, maybe because I’m French. For us, there are no issues with these kind of images. It’s very natural. There’s nothing shocking. I think it will be interesting to see how different countries react to that image.”"

Read more in the British Journal of Photography and on the Institute of Artist Management website.

Femen November 11, 2010

Posted by bohdan.warchomij in : Femen, Ukraine, Ukrainian Photographers , add a comment

Ukraine’s wars of symbols took an especially interesting turn on October 27, my birthday. The imagery accompanying the event analysed by Alexander Motyl has impacted extensively on the European stage.

“Vladimir Putin, Russia’s prime minister, came to Kiev that day to pursue negotiations with his Ukrainian counterpart, Mykola Azarov, over energy. While policymakers and pundits debated the pros and cons of closer Russo-Ukrainian energy cooperation, FEMEN — a Ukrainian feminist group — staged a symbolically fascinating anti-Putin demonstration in downtown Kiev (see the video clip here).

Six young women, bare-chested, clad in stylish, tight-fitting jeans, and wearing beribboned wreaths typical of traditional Ukrainian folk costumes, held placards and shouted slogans in front of the capital city’s most famous statue of Lenin, at the foot of Shevchenko Boulevard. The site is witness to periodic tussles between anti-Communists, who detest Lenin and want to deface his image, and Communists, who worship the Father of Communism and want to preserve it.

This time, the Communists were nowhere to be seen. After all, why worry about a few half-naked girls? Little did Ukraine’s Stalinists suspect that FEMEN’s topless protest could be far more destructive than anything the anti-Communists could do. One can always fix or clean a statue. Nudity, on the other hand, is freedom from social constraints par excellence; as such, it stands in diametrical opposition to the dictatorship of the prudish proletariat and Lenin’s baleful totalitarian legacy.

FEMEN’s demonstration made two more politically important points. First, the antics were an obvious dig at Putin’s painfully embarrassing attempts to project a bare-chested macho image. And second, FEMEN’s attire struck a symbolic blow against the Yanukovich regime’s determination to marginalize Ukrainian identity and reduce Ukrainian culture to a museum curio. The combination of svelte bodies, trendy jeans, and Ukrainian folk costumes loudly declared that being Ukrainian is both hip and modern.

What the FEMENists had to say was also quite striking. Several of their placards read “Ukraine is not Alina” — a sexually charged reference to Alina Kabaeva, the 27-year old Olympic-medal-winning Russian gymnast rumored to be Putin’s girlfriend. Another read: “We won’t give ourselves to the dwarves” — another sexually charged reference to Prime Minister Putin and President Medvedev, Russia’s diminutive leaders. The FEMENists also chanted “Putin go home” and “You can’t force us down so easily.” A spokeswoman stated, in Russian no less, that the group wants Putin “to know … that Ukraine doesn’t want to see him here. Ukraine knows why he came. He wants to break off parts of Ukraine. We won’t give him that. All of Ukraine won’t permit that. We simply reflect the views of all of Ukraine.”

Whether FEMEN actually reflects the views of all of Ukraine is debatable. Public opinion surveys show that significant parts of the population in the southeast of the country might be quite happy with giving Putin “parts of Ukraine.” And FEMEN itself, established in 2008 by a group of Kiev university students, has hardly become a mass movement. On the other hand, FEMEN probably does reflect the views of significant portions of Ukrainian students and its ability to attract media attention with well publicized happenings has transformed it into an important part of Ukraine’s ongoing symbolic wars.

Significantly, FEMEN has managed to combine several seemingly disparate ideological trends. The group is unquestionably feminist and hopes to shock Ukraine’s straightlaced society and sexist establishment. But it is also openly modern and nationalist, aspiring to a contemporary, independent, and liberal homeland. It has also adopted a progressively broader and more overtly political agenda — beginning in 2009 with actions against sexual harassment at universities, the Miss Universe competition, and sex tourism, then moving to protests against electoral fraud, the absence of women in the Yanukovich-appointed cabinet, and, now, Vladimir Putin.

Committed to “the principles of social awareness and activism, intellectual and cultural development” and “the European values of freedom, equality and comprehensive development of a person irrespective of the gender,” the FEMENists are clearly the intellectual and cultural offspring of the Orange Revolution.

Yanukovich’s Stalinist supporters will consider FEMEN to be one more reason to damn everything Orange. Ukraine’s young people, on the other hand, may take heart. The “Sixties” could finally be coming to Ukraine.

_______________________________________________________

Update. After the protest, the Kiev city militia has attempted to crack down on FEMEN for “hooliganism.” Since the Kiev City administration is now in the hands of President Yanukovich’s allies, the harassment is obviously an attempt by Yanukovich to kowtow to the Kremlin. The group remains unrepentant, and its leader, Anna Hutsol, stated: “We assert that FEMEN’s topless form of protest is an act of civil disobedience and not a form of hooliganism. The FEMEN women’s movement has all the legal grounds for conducting protests in any form not forbidden by law and against anyone, whether it’s the president of Ukraine or the premier of Russia!” —”

ALEXANDER J. MOTYL is professor of political science at Rutgers University-Newark, as well as a writer and painter. He served as associate director of the Harriman Institute at Columbia University in 1992-1998. A specialist on Ukraine, Russia, and the USSR, and on nationalism, revolutions, empires, and theory, he is the author of Pidsumky imperii; Puti imperii; Imperial Ends: The Decay, Collapse, and Revival of Empires; Revolutions, Nations, Empires: Conceptual Limits and Theoretical Possibilities; Dilemmas of Independence: Ukraine after Totalitarianism; Sovietology, Rationality, Nationality: Coming to Grips with Nationalism in the USSR; Will the Non‑Russians Rebel? State, Ethnicity, and Stability in the USSR; The Turn to the Right: The Ideological Origins and Development of Ukrainian Nationalism, 1919‑1929, and the editor of over ten volumes, including The Encyclopedia of Nationalism. Motyl’s novels include Whiskey Priest; Who Killed Andrei Warhol; Flippancy; The Jew Who Was Ukrainian; and the work in progress, My Orchidia. His poems have appeared in Counterexample Poetics, Istanbul Literary Review, and New York Quarterly (forthcoming). He has done performances of his fiction at the Cornelia Street Café, the Bowery Poetry Club, and the Ukrainian Museum in New York. Motyl’s artwork has been shown in solo and group shows in New York, Philadelphia, and Toronto; his art is represented by The Tori Collection.

From: World Affairs: A Journal of Ideas and Debate

http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/

Putin WEB

Femen
Femen