Previously, I had disseminated my book, Battle Against Stigma, for free to prison libraries, mental health charities and homeless centers throughout the UK in order to encourage more veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) to come forward and seek professional help. This was following the three months I spent embedded with the British paratroopers in Afghanistan in 2011 as an official ‘war artist’ and my own experience of PTSD that resulted.
I was surprised and impressed that a ‘former Soviet country’ like Ukraine would be so forward thinking in its desire to understand and treat PTSD, when my own country had effectively tried to ban the book, with the UK Border Force seizing 500 copies as the consignment entered UK customs in 2015. When I flew to Ukraine for the first time to meet people at the Military Hospital, I immediately understood that this was a country traumatized by war. Even in its vibrant, modern capital Kyiv, I felt and saw in people’s faces the weight of the conflict raging 600 km away. I recognised a trauma in them: a mirroring of my own journey with PTSD that began when I had returned from Helmand, Afghanistan. It was then I immediately decided to make a book which attempted to stop the war in Donbas…I would subsequently visit Donbas around 50 times. And not only Donbas, I found myself almost coming up with excuses to leave my London home and return to all parts of Ukraine for work: to exhibit in museums there, to make images and realize new projects, and to do talks there. I also began to make Ukrainian friends. At a certain point I realized that Ukraine, not London, was my true home, and that it was where my heart belonged.
When did you fall in love with the country? Do you remember a precise moment?
Yes…Throughout 2017 I traveled through Ukraine making new work for ZOiS – the Centre for Eastern European and International Studies in Berlin – focusing on the estimated 2.5 million internally and externally displaced Ukrainians resulting from the war in Donbas. It was during the making of Displaced Ukrainians (2016-17) that I fell in love with this country. I interviewed countless families who had been forced to flee their homes in Donbas, who had witnessed and experienced unimaginable horror, and who literally had nothing left; no possessions, no security, no income, no pension, and no hope. Yet not once did any one of them ask me for support, nor for financial assistance. They just wanted me to tell their story. And I have been to some bloody awful, desperate places in my life, where people invariably ask me for help to escape or to give them money – and this is an absolutely natural human response, I would do the same. But these displaced Ukrainians never asked me for anything, not once. And that is exceptional…Then when I returned to London after that trip I realized I was not the same person anymore; I had learned something very significant from these people. I was not just seduced, but I was in love with Ukraine. Much later, in 2020, I also fell in love with a Ukrainian, Lukeriia.
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