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- From the series “The Morphology of War”
Biedarieva Svitlana
Listen to the artist’s voice recording about the work (in Ukrainian)
“The Morphology of War” is a graphic series by Svitlana Biedarieva, in which corporeality and weaponry merge into a single, grotesque composition.
The image depicts human figures, animals, and fantastical creatures drawn into a shared dance of violence. Their bodies are distorted yet still recognizable—symbols of how war fractures identity, strips away humanity, and transforms the familiar into the absurd.
The black line of the drawing evokes both an anatomical diagram and a medieval fresco. Through this visual language, the artist portrays war not as an event, but as a morphology—a form of existence of a world in decay.
Svitlana Biedarieva is a Ukrainian art historian, artist, and curator. Her research and curatorial practice focus on Ukrainian art after 2014, decoloniality in culture, and anti-colonial resistance through art, as well as comparative studies of contemporary art in Eastern Europe and Latin America.
She holds a PhD in History of Art from the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London.
Since the beginning of the war in 2014, she has worked extensively on decolonisation and the documentation of war in Ukrainian art. As a curator, she has been building collaborations between Ukraine and the Global South, particularly Latin America. Her co-curated exhibition At the Front Line: Ukrainian Art, 2013–2019 (National Museum of Cultures, Mexico City, 2019) was the first major cultural project in Latin America dedicated to contemporary Ukrainian art, later presented in Canada.
Biedarieva is the author of Ambicoloniality and War: The Ukrainian-Russian Case (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025), editor of Art in Ukraine between Identity Construction and Anti-Colonial Resistance (Routledge, 2024) and Contemporary Ukrainian and Baltic Art: Political and Social Perspectives, 1991–2021 (ibidem Press, 2021), and co-editor of At the Front Line: Ukrainian Art, 2013–2019 (Editorial 17, 2020).
Her texts have appeared in October, Daedalus, ArtMargins, Space and Culture, post (MoMA), Financial Times, Burlington Contemporary, The Art Newspaper, and other publications. She also serves on the editorial board of the Ukrainian Voices series at ibidem Press.
As an artist, she explores war, violence, and decolonial space through digital graphics, painting, and installation. Her large-scale digital mural project The Morphology of War (2017–2023) reflects on the dehumanising aspects of Russia’s war against Ukraine and has been exhibited in the UK, Mexico, Estonia, the US, Ukraine, Cuba, Finland, and Germany. She is a recipient of numerous international awards, fellowships, and residencies, including the Prince Claus Seed Award.