The Indifference of Nature: Interview with Ukrainian Artist Kateryna Aliinyk

Recent estimates suggest that approximately one-third of Ukrainian land has been degraded, including at least a quarter of the country’s agricultural land, since the outset of Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022. This interview with Ukrainian artist Kateryna Aliinyk explores how her paintings and other artworks make the environmental devastation of the conflict visible through a focus on what war buries in the soil. The interview probes how Aliinyk’s art offers, in her words, “a metaphor for [the] not-so-visible and slow violence” that infuses everyday life under occupation, as well as themes of displacement, memory, loss, attachment to land, and gardening as individual and collective self-preservation even in crisis.

© 2026 Public Access and the authors and artists. Published by Intellect Ltd