My Body is a Battlefield offers a comprehensive insight into the work of the Ukrainian artist
Maria Kulikovska born in Crimea in 1988. Already in her early works she deals with patriarchal
structures and the absence of female subjectivity in Ukrainian art. With the annexation of
Crimea and the ensuing war questions of identity and belonging and the themes of border and
violence become leitmotifs of her artistic practice. Kulikovska's sculptures are exact copies
of her body or individual body parts. Made of unusual materials such as ballistic soap grease
or epoxy resin the casts are subject to processes of aging and decay are modified
transformed and deconstructed. In her watercolors and drawings created as series for example
on medical reports and authority forms she designs bodies that resist the markings and
boundaries of the paper as much as the bureaucratic constraints and gender fixations formulated
there. Her ceramics-molds of severed limbs and replicas of bodily fluids-are forms of rage and
despair in the face of the brutality and horrors of war. Kulikovska shows her body as a site of
conflicting emotions and traumatic memories as a contested arena of ideological attributions
and warlike aggression she asserts herself drastically and dramatically against gender and
sexual norming against violence and subjugation. The illustrated book was published on the
occasion of the exhibition of the same name at the Francisco Carolinum in Linz the artist's
first solo exhibition in the German-speaking world.
