War, Art, and Survival: Alevtina Kakhidze and Oleksiy Sai on Creating Through Invasion

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2026/01/17

Alevtina Kakhidze (born 1973, Zhdanivka, Donetsk region) is a contemporary Ukrainian artist whose practice spans drawing, performance, time-based media, curation and collaboration. Based in Muzychi near Kyiv, she studied at the National Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture and the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht. Her work explores consumerism, plants, feminism, everyday life in war and occupation, and the ethics of care. She received the Kazimir Malevich Award and serves as a UN Tolerance Ambassador.

Oleksiy Sai (born 1975, Kyiv) is a Ukrainian contemporary artist known for “Excel-Art,” which turns Excel spreadsheets into images. Trained in graphic design at Kyiv College of Arts and Industries and in easel graphics at the National Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture, he lives and works in Kyiv. Sai’s digital prints, installations and war-related projects, including the “Bombed” series and the Burning Man sculpture I’m Fine, directly confront office culture, Russian aggression and propaganda.

In this conversation with Scott Douglas Jacobsen, Ukrainian artists Alevtina Kakhidze and Oleksiy Sai reflect on two decades of friendship, collaboration, and creation under the shadow of war. From early projects like the Candies Brides fashion show to today’s memorial works and “Excel-Art,” they trace how Russia’s full-scale invasion reshaped their sense of time, ethics, and artistic responsibility. They describe Ukrainians’ “wartime folklore,” dark humour, and the psychological toll of constant loss, alongside practical shifts—faster working methods, new refugee constraints, and foreign institutions suddenly seeking Ukrainian art. Throughout, they insist that Ukrainians “only make the world better, not worse,” even while “just surviving.”

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How long have you two known each other?

Oleksiy Sai: Twenty years maybe—maybe fifteen.

Alevtina Kakhidze: I remember you from the Candies Brides event.

Sai: It was around 2009, something like that.

Kakhidze: Yes, I remember that you went with the back of Candies.

Sai: Yeah, so fifteen years.

Kakhidze: I remember this very vividly. It could be something else, I do not know. It was 2009, Candies Brides’ work.

Jacobsen: Were there any distinct points of collaboration that should be noted at the outset?

Kakhidze: Collaboration? I remember selling Lesha’s works very cheaply in my village.

Sai: And we did a mural. A mural.

Jacobsen: We had a collaboration.

Kakhidze: About futures—about futures and different futures. It was pictures for the fashion show, to get some money.

Jacobsen: If you look back at that time in 2009, and then at 2014 and 2022, do you notice any change in how art is made or portrayed in Ukraine during each of those phases—pre-war, early war?

Sai: Everything is changing constantly. Sometimes we do whatever needs to be done. 

Kakhidze: Ukraine changed a lot, but my perception of the world changed dramatically. Before this war, I was not so pessimistic about countries, geography, or constellations. I am very disappointed in this world. I am more pleased with the whole. The world is very different: not well educated, not having much, having a feeble imagination—and I understand the reasons and the circumstances. 

Jacobsen: Liosha, what about you?

Kakhidze: But do not take it personally, Scott. You may be one of the people who genuinely think it is valuable to talk to Ukrainians, because what we are going through is incredible, dramatic, and unfair. I do not know what to say. It is such an unjust world.

Sai: Yes, and we can tell many stories, because even for us, each day, a new, unimaginable story can happen to any of us. It is a time when you are no longer surprised, yet you are still amazed. As our friend Super said, even if aliens—green men—emerged from a flying saucer, we would not be surprised.

Kakhidze: Ukrainians are very tough people, and it’s hard to have a pleasant conversation with us. You will not get dopamine—dopamine satisfaction—from us.

Jacobsen: There was a woman who gave me a Ukrainian quote at the end of an interview. She said, ‘Those whom the fire has hardened cannot be burned by it.’ Have you heard this? That was her opinion of Ukrainians right now. 

Sai: Yes, we have the same. We have a lot of new wartime folklore and memes around this. That is true. But if you step back a little, there is still everyday life. It is polluted—well, more than a bit. But it is still life. Yesterday I went to the cinema to see a film, and there were many people there. Many were active participants in the war, and many were not. It is visible. You cannot always tell how deeply someone is involved in the war, but sometimes you can recognize: this one is from this bubble, this one from that part of society. And people are mixing. Some are ignorant, but now that is a minority,I think. These last decades have changed a lot in our society—probably in all Eastern Europe. Hopefully, we will see what comes when it spreads, because it will. Even if we win, this war will spread—not as an active war, probably—but we will see the consequences for the rest of our lives, I think.

Kakhidze: Scott, do you know the propagandist on Russian TV? One of them, Margarita Simonyan, wrote today that they will take Ukraine by itself or maybe together with Paris.

Sai: They have their own folklore.

Kakhidze: But the question is: Russians allow themselves this kind of folklore, as Liosha said. But when you are in Europe—and I am very close to Paris now in Belgium—if I say this to anyone I meet, they will think I am mad. But this woman I mentioned is speaking on Russian state TV. Many people in Russia listen to her. And it could be something we think we do not need to take seriously. But honestly, after everything that happened in Russia before 2014 and again before 2022, I now take it into account and take it pretty seriously. 

When you have this attitude toward everything you see in Ukraine and also notice in Russia, you understand everything, because our Russian is perfect, and we can notice any nuance. We are the best experts on the Russian context, but still no one listens to us. I am in the position of an observer, like, “Okay, let us see what will happen.” I am happy that Oleksiy and I are the same age; we have already had our lives. But Liosha has a family, two sons, who still have their lives ahead of them, which probably makes him more stressed than me, because I have only dogs, and they will probably die before I do. So this pessimistic view of everything I see in the world—I do not think it is only about Ukraine; it is about the world in general. Ukrainians only make it better, not worse.

Sai: This war and our thoughts will bring some bad things into visibility elsewhere in the world, because it is not only our thing now. Not because we will spread and tell the world about us—no. It will simply happen. Not only wars, but also other things. Something will happen, different things, and people must be prepared to live. But we are maybe too poetic.

Jacobsen: Do you think the wars changed the character of your artistic energies?

Kakhidze: I do not know. I do not think so. Liosha is the same.

Sai: We are the same—just surviving.

Kakhidze: Look, I will show you this: all the time I train with a tourniquet, and now it is ancient, so I use it as a belt. I trained with it so often that it no longer works for training, and now I keep it for the craziness of it. And by the way, we stay in Ilyushin with Tanya, you know, and I always say, “Alexei, you are a great designer.”

Jacobsen: Wartime runway.

Kakhidze: I just went downstairs where I live, and a Belgian woman—she is a musician—had put all these colonial things from Africa on display behind glass. She said, “Alevtina, be very careful not to break the sculptures.” And I said, “Yes, meanwhile people are being killed in Kyiv—many missiles and drones—many more people are being killed now.”How many? In the morning, it was four. Two houses were destroyed.

Sai: I have not read the news today. I made a detox. But from what I heard, it is six now.

Kakhidze: I was just in conversation with my husband. He wrote me at 6 a.m. that he was still on the stairs, and our dogs were in the banya. It is the small house where we have baths. My dogs are very well trained; they know when there is shelling, they must find shelter. First, they go to the main house; if it is closed, then to my studio; if that is closed, then to the banya. And the banya was closed too, but they destroyed the lock—just a simple lock—and broke in. What can we even talk about? I am telling you the humanistic side of it.

Sai: Today, I will meet my friend—you also know him. He is one of the most avant-garde electronic artists. He makes challenging, tedious work for a tiny audience, live. He wrote to me that he is coming back to Kyiv for a few days and wants to meet. Now he holds the rank of major, and he is literally bigger than a doorway—he became enormous. We are changing. Some of us are changing a lot. I met him in Venice.

Kakhidze: I have a photo with him. He is enormously huge—enormously huge. But you did not tell Scott that Robotov joined the armed forces voluntarily?

Sai: Yes, voluntarily, but he had military education at his university, so he became a lieutenant.

Kakhidze: And you know, Scott, Max is advancing so quickly in his military career. I am right. Many different units want him, because artists are brilliant and very skilled. When we are on the front line, we can always find ways to use our capacity, because artists are not like other people. We always have our own ideas. We are independent. We are responsible, because we are always responsible for our art and for ourselves. So I would say artists are almost the best soldiers—and Max proves this. Max probably misses his artwork, but not only him. I think also about Ivan, Ivan—and very much. Ivan, and also Horsha; he is a genius electronic composer. He is busy with things now. Scott, the difference is that in the Ukrainian army, we have the best people. But in the Russian military—ask any intellectual—they will not be able to tell you a single notable name. That is the difference. From time to time, we go to funerals. In every social circle, in every bubble, I already have three commissions for funerals—memorial works. Scott, can you imagine? Three, for myfriends.

Jacobsen: Yes, I believe that. I completely believe that. Someone told me a number: one in four Ukrainians either knows someone in the army or is in the military themselves.

Sai: Yes, there are many. Cinematographers—every part of society volunteered equally.

Jacobsen: Do you think there is a difference between the type of artist who voluntarily joins the army and those who are conscripted?

Jacobsen: No. Completely different people join. It is not that one subculture joins and another does not. It is mixed.

Kakhidze: Yes, but the point is that we now know ourselves. Some of us became absolutely scared and felt real fear, and used any opportunity to leave the country. They did. Some joined voluntarily. Some did not want to, but when they received the invitation, they went. I just mentioned three categories of people. They come from different spheres—art, literature, music.

Sai: You do not know your own reaction to things until it happens. It is a big surprise.

Kakhidze: We discovered ourselves so much. Yes.

Jacobsen: Has anyone become an artist because of the war—someone who was not an artist before?

Kakhidze: Yes, there are. Maria Leonenko became an artist because of the war—before she was not. And some people started doing things they had always postponed. For instance, we have a gallery man, Wojtek. He decided to open a gallery because he always wanted to, and then he thought: “Okay, if I am killed tomorrow and never become a gallery man?” So he opened a gallery. I do not know what else. What do you think—who became an artist? But young people: I teach, and there are so many young people in online courses, of different types.

Jacobsen: What type of art are people getting into—the ones who were not artists before, but the war made them artists? Is it painting, sculpture, or poetry? All types, obviously, but what is the distribution?

Kakhidze: It does not matter. But if you become a refugee, producing sculptures is almost impossible. But drawings are not so heavy. I do not have this data. I can only talk about myself.

Jacobsen: Has it changed the timelines of any of your art pieces? Has it changed the timelines of any of your pieces of art, or the timelines of the art pieces you choose? For example, short versus long: some works take a day, some take weeks, some take months—and now you might pick shorter ones.

Kakhidze: Yes, Ukrainians have become very quick, and I personally. You cannot postpone. If you can do it—not necessarily perfectly, but in any way—you do it. We do not have the privilege of time for our art. I produce drawings very quickly now. There is no time to think things over. I am very quick because time and electricity are limited. You do not have time. We are very quick, I would say. If you are not fast, you are not an artist.

Sai: We are very fast in producing art because there is no time to think it over. If we lack electricity, time, or need something done, we do it very quickly.

Kakhidze: Use what you have and do it. But Liosha produces sculptures—because the question was about sculptures. Buthe produces conceptually. And I said that for refugees, it is impossible to make sculptures, because how would you move or relocate them?

Jacobsen: Traditionally speaking, artists tend to be poor. In wartime, does that change financial considerations around art as well? Although this differs by style.

Sai: Yes. For myself, I did other things for money. I was a director for TV commercials, and it was okay. I divided my time between what I did in my studio and what I did for money. With the full-scale invasion, I decided to quit the commercial part. It should organize itself somehow. And I am at an okay level.

I do not know how I learned to earn money, but I survive somehow. I do not have much to spend. Mostly, it is payments for the studio, materials, and such. My kids are grown up, so they do their own work for money. But we have forgotten our development plans. It is easier when you do not plan—when you live chaotically during this time. For me, it is more or less okay. I think I will lose some opportunities for sure, but fuck it. I do not have time.

Kakhidze: But look—I started to earn more money with the war. I just said I started earning more money during this war.

Jacobsen: So what are the reasons, other than the war itself?

Kakhidze: It is because of foreign institutions. They suddenly recognized Ukraine as a country, then realized they had nothing from Ukraine in their collections. And then they started searching for someone to buy something from. Since I have been networking over the last three and a half years, I have sold to many places, including museums. I even sold already-produced works to the Tate Modern. Before that, as far as I knew, there was only one artist from Ukraine who had been presented there — Boris Mikhailov. Then they started buying, but it is a pity, because Ukraine is the largest country entirely in Europe and the second-largest in Europe after Russia, yet major museums and investors had almost nothing in their collections clearly identified as coming from Ukraine.

Jacobsen: That is wild. Lyosha, any thoughts?

Sai: I worked on the topic of war ten years ago at the beginning. In parallel, I did something else; I wanted to do more peaceful things. Now that it has happened, I reflect on the war. I changed the topic. I cannot draw, I cannot analyze. Is it something that has changed around me?

Kakhidze: You changed the topic? Interesting. I am too lazy, Scott, while I am working on the subject of war.

Sai: You changed the topic, too. You do not change the way you work. You did not change the subject — the topic chose you. It will probably be seen what happened in the future. I cannot analyze. Many people change the way they make their art. Many people do not change, but change the idea behind what they do. 

It is not only about brutality or aesthetics. Sometimes it is just a slight shift, but the change between what they did before and what they do now can be theatrical. It is only visible to those directly involved.

Jacobsen: Do you think the style of humour in art has changed as well? 

Kakhidze: If you talk about me, I remember that I worked with the topic of war from the perspective of my mother, and I did not allow myself jokes or irony. When the war connected with me directly, I allowed myself jokes and irony. I started to make jokes about myself. When I was sitting in a cellar in March 2022 — because my village is near Bucha, and the Russians were five kilometres from my studio —, I decided to write many jokes about what was happening. If you look at my drawings, they have a sense of humour. But to produce jokes about my mother’s life under the occupation, I did not allow myself. I think this is something ethical.

Sai: I remember I called you in the first days of the full-scale invasion and asked why you were still there in the music sheets.

Kakhidze: Ah, yes, you phoned me.

Sai: You made a joke somehow. What I heard sounded like a joke.

Kakhidze: I do not remember you phoning me. My God. It was absolutely wild that we decided to stay, because if the Russians had been more innovative and quicker, they would have taken my village. And there wouldn’t be any artist talking to you, Scott. It was wild.

Jacobsen: I have a few questions that come to mind about humour that already exists in the culture. Every culture has its own flavour. In North America, in Canada, we call it dark humour. I do not know what the Ukrainian equivalent would be. You were referencing how some things—excluding your mother’s story—became subjects of humour in light of the extreme aspects of that moment. And particularly within your style of art, cartoons and caricatures are a perfect point for humour. They are like Looney Tunes: people care, characters matter, and the form fits humour well. Have you noticed any tones or types of jokes, or ways in which popular figures are portrayed in cartoons or caricatures, that the war has influenced in any way? 

Kakhidze: Yes, I think so. Of course, it relates to everyone. If you produce jokes all the time and no one is laughing, then you do not want to laugh because you do not want to laugh at your own joke.

Jacobsen: If you are telling jokes and people are laughing with you, you are a comedian. If you are telling jokes and people are laughing at you, you are a clown.

Kakhidze: Yes, okay.

Jacobsen: I remember my Romanian colleague and I went to a decommissioned nuclear site. For those reading who do not know, Ukraine had the third-largest nuclear arsenal, and part of the deal, which was an honour, was that they would denuclearize. One of the sites we went to was a decommissioned launch facility. You go into the bunker and walk down a concrete tunnel about 100 meters long, lined with pipes. Then you open one of those massive steel doors, take a tiny elevator, and go down twelve stories into the command and control center where launches would have been carried out. It is now a museum. You pay extra to see that. A lieutenant there portrayed Putin. He was of the firm opinion that Ukraine would go on to win the war. I asked if he had any words to describe Putin. He said something, and I had to use Google Translate because I don’t know many Ukrainian words. I translated it, showed it to him, and he said, “Yes, that is correct.”He said, “Putin is an asshole goat.” Very colourful phrasing. Have you noticed similarly colourful caricatures—ways people portray political figures or authoritarians—in the humour that emerges during a war?

Kakhidze: I would not say that Putin is… I think he is an uneducated dreamer and an insecure person.

Jacobsen: He is in his mid-70s now. So the characterization is insecure.

Kakhidze: Yes, but why uneducated? He has had ample time to educate himself. If he had educated himself properly, everything he says about history would not be incorrect. If he were well educated, he would know that empires will fall anyway. The world cannot have new empires again and again. It is impossible. This is his thing. He thinks he is smart, but he is not.

Jacobsen: I looked at the numbers, and about 90 percent of the world’s population lives in 62 countries. The top three—India, China, the United States—obviously, India and China take the most significant share, but neither India nor China individually makes up even 20 percent of the world population; they are around 16 or 17 percent each. So the idea of a national empire, because we live in an era of nation-states, is ridiculous. 

By population alone, we live in a multipolar world. To your point, you might have some regional influence, but any form of unipolarity is a ridiculous notion. And fabricating histories to justify it is even more ludicrous. Even in the mid-to-late 2000s, when Putin hosted the Sochi Olympics, he gave speeches in English and seemed genuinely charming to some degree. Do you think something changed in his own perception of Russian history in that ten- to fifteen-year period?

Kakhidze: Yes, a lot. If you go to a bookstore in Ukraine and ask the sellers what sells best, they will say history books.

Jacobsen: Yes.

Kakhidze: I listened to all the lectures of Timothy Snyder. During these three and a half years, I improved my understanding of history so much.

Jacobsen: Yes.

Kakhidze: One thing. The second is what I learned about Russia: they are talented at only one thing—lying. They are the most gifted liars. Everything we read in school when I was in a Soviet school was a lie. About the Second World War, about the history before Ukrainians and Russians became “together.” And we were not really Ukrainians, and Russians were not really Russians. These were just communities. But everything had to be learned again—a rapid external course.

Jacobsen: Sure, we call it continuing education.

Kakhidze: But I also remember something else. I have a private residency in Kyiv Oblast, and I had a Canadian girl…

Jacobsen: Which city was she from? Was she East or West Coast? Toronto, Vancouver, Ottawa, Calgary, Edmonton?

Kakhidze: Yes, Vancouver.

Jacobsen: Okay, that is my region. That is my neck of the woods. 

Kakhidze: To give you her name: she gave me so much understanding about your history. And the history is not a pleasant page. It is about the internet and the schools for Indigenous people. Her name is Fleurie Hunter. I just sent it to you. I thought, “My God, you see schools where Indigenous kids were taken from their parents to change their identity.”Now Russia is doing the same with Ukrainian kids.

Jacobsen: I interviewed with a woman who is the head of, I think, the Almenda organization. She is twenty-seven. She was originally from Crimea and left in 2014. She said the same thing about the Russian Federation’s Russification education project. The propaganda is very effective in terms of indoctrination, but it comes with abuse—physical and emotional—for Ukrainian kids who are kidnapped, abducted, and trapped in that system. Fleurie has a Ukrainian background, too. The difference between the Ukrainian case and the Canadian case is that the Canadian case was a dual institutional project: a secular institution through the Canadian government approved the implementation of practical work—the abuse and indoctrination of kids—by the churches. It was a secular–religious harmonization project aimed at propagandizing the young. In the Russian case, the Russian Orthodox Church is essentially an arm of the Russian state, but this is genuinely a state project. That is the distinction, I think.

Kakhidze: In Russia, it is also a project. It is also a program. I am working on this film a lot. We interviewed kids from different camps, and they all said the same things. One day, their stories will be permanent.

Jacobsen: The big thing is the education gaps. They have to unlearn and then start their education again. That affects the rest of their lives. Their proper education will probably begin in their twenties unless they take a lot of summer classes and after-school work, all while dealing with trauma. What project are you working on regarding that?

Kakhidze: It is an animated film. I am producing animated characters. I am not an animator; I am creating the prototypes and panoramas. Then the director, Tatiana Hadakivska, works with animation companies that animate her story using my images.

Jacobsen: Very cool.

Kakhidze: She interviewed seventy-two kids who were stolen in Ukraine. 

Jacobsen: This is a lot. We actually have the main characters, who are really cool kids. The whole idea of the stolen children… I will tell you many things, and you can say whether you know them or not. The biggest problem with the stolen kids is that in many cases, the families themselves brought them to the Russians.

Jacobsen: That part… that is a whole other situation.

Kakhidze: But why did it happen? First of all, some parents were trying to secure their children because the Russians said, “We will deliver them to a safe area.” Since they stole them from occupied areas very close to the front line, some parents gave up their kids to protect them. The second category is when families were forced to hand over children because the Russians came with weapons and said, “If you do not give us your child, we will cancel your parental rights. Your attitude toward your child is horrible. Look, there is shelling every day, and you keep your child near you.” 

They created the war and then blamed families for keeping their children in a war situation. And if parents refused to give the child, they would lose their parental rights. That is one category. The third category is parents’ indoctrination. Some family members were indoctrinated, but not all. Kids were stolen by an aunt, by a grandmother, by someone else in the family. For instance, we have two girls whose mother is in the military. While their mother was serving, members of the family stole her children. Imagine that—crazy. And then in these camps, the kids who were more accepting of Russian indoctrination, or sympathetic to Russia, or who at home always spoke Russian and sang Russian songs—those kids were more or less okay and even collaborated with the leaders of the camps to bully Ukrainian kids. 

This is the story. She decided to use more animation than she planned because it is the best way to tell the story without showing the kids. We do not want to show the kids.  She filmed them, but she does not want to show them because when they tell all this violent stuff, they do not look good on camera. We have to draw everything they told us, and that is why the value of animation has become increasingly labour-intensive for me.  I hope we meet again soon. It was great to talk with you.

Jacobsen: It was nice. Bye-bye.

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