Victoria Lomasko and the Graphic Language of Empathy

In 2014, Russian artist Victoria Lomasko travelled to Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan. There, she made sketches of couples dancing in the only gay club in a country that does not recognize its LGBTQI community. Lomasko drew young female activists working toward holding the first ever ManaschiManaschi are male reciters of the Epic of Manas. contest for women with the support of the FRIDA Young Feminist Fund. She also spoke with members of the Dungan community, a disadvantaged minority group of Chinese origin living on Kyrgyz soil. The following year, Lomasko visited Yerevan, Armenia. She sat down with idle youths, senior citizens, Syrian refugees, women involved in the sex trade, prison inmates, and activists who fight to protect their neighbourhood from being demolished. In 2016 and 2017, she travelled to Georgia and Dagestan. Again, she sought out people living on the margins: squatters, members of ethnic minorities, artists, and freedom-of-speech activists. And she drew those who confided in her, empathetically creating their portraits from life and transcribing their testimonies directly onto the white pages of her sketchbook. Victoria LomaskoDessin de la série | sketch from the series, A Trip to Tbilisi, « Here the Church eats up twenty-five million laris of the state budget. On the Patriarch’s birthday, artists painted the inscription “25,000,000” on the pavement in front of his residence. They were asked to report to the police the next day, » 2016.Photo : permission de l’artiste | courtesy of the artist For close to ten years, Lomasko has been spearheading Russia’s graphic journalism movement. Her disciplined approach leads her to seek out sources, assemble and verify facts, and document social events and processes in words and images. As a genre, graphic journalism appeared in the late 1990s, and it has carved out an important place in both the art world and the international publishing industry over the past twenty years. It emerged out of the New Journalism movement begun in the 1960s, when several writers challenged the notion of objectivity in reporting and developed a style that called attention to their subjectivity.Rocco Versaci, This Book Contains Graphic Language: Comics as Literature (London: Continuum, 2007), 27, 110 — 11. By blending words and images, graphic journalism also creates an intimate atmosphere and “achieve layers of meaning inaccessible to prose journalism alone.”Ibid., 111. Although Lomasko clearly pursues these goals, her work nevertheless follows a different lineage. In early Soviet times, artists, poets, and filmmakers, such as Vladimir Mayakovsky, Aleksandr Deineka, Yuri Pimenov, Dziga Vertov, and Aleksandr Medvedkin, were encouraged to travel across the newly formed country to witness and make art that documented life as it was taking shape. They were themselves building on a tradition of war journalism (the work of Ivan Vladimirov, who meticulously painted the events of the revolutions of 1905 and 1917) and of critical realism as developed in the work of the Peredvizhniki, a group of Russian artists who broke with the academy in order to address the life and struggles of their contemporaries. Lomasko also borrows from marginal forms: the albums produced by Russian soldiers at the front, by those who witnessed the Nazi siege of Leningrad, and by internment camp inmates. These documents, which often combine word and image, were becoming available in Russia at the turn of the twenty-first century, during Lomasko’s formative years, as Soviet archives were being opened and former detainees and so-called enemies of the state were being rehabilitated, often posthumously. The albums in particular communicate urgency and their creators appeal to their viewers’ humanity with the minimal means that were available to them.Lomasko sketches from life, never from photographs. Her black-and-white drawings, sometimes bearing accents of colour, are deceptively simple. They are dense with information, allowing viewers to imagine spaces, textures, and smells through deftly placed objects and the use of contrast. But Lomasko does more than draw. She offers an empathetic ear and transcribes fragments of conversations in speech bubbles or overlapping text, sometimes tracing her subjects’ given name along the contour of their figures. Through this treatment, and their frontal address, they are given a voice, and a human face is quite literally put on a situation. Giving voice to those who are silenced is an essential mission, especially if, following Michel Foucault, we understand silencing as a way to perpetuate oppression.M. Foucault, “Cours du 7 janvier, 1976,” In Il faut défendre la société. Cours au Collège de France, 1976 (Paris: Gallimard et Seuil, 1997), 3 — 19. Opening a space where the voice can circulate, where experience can be shared, is also the first step in breaking silence and isolation.Abdelwahed Mekki-Berrada, Cécile Rousseau and Jocelyne Bertot, “Research on Refugees: Means of Transmitting Suffering and Forging Social Bonds,” International Journal of Mental Health 30, no. 2 (2001): 41 — 57. Victoria LomaskoDessin de la série | sketch from the series, A Trip to Bishkek, « A week after giving birth, Dungan women go back to work in the fields, » 2014.Photo : permission de l’artiste | courtesy of the artist There are many practical reasons why Lomasko would use drawing rather than photography or film to create her visual accounts: restricted areas, such as courtrooms, prisons, and juvenile detention centres, do not allow cameras. Moreover, many of her subjects — migrant workers, violence survivors, sex workers, protesters — do not want to be photographed because they could face extreme repercussions if recognized. But mainly, her spontaneous, expressive, untidy drawing style produces something that slicker mediums cannot. It eschews “turn human beings into things, things into living beings,” as photography often does, according to Susan Sontag.Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Picador, 2001), 98. It also precludes “suffering at a distance” and a too-easy appropriation by popular culture, as French sociologist Luc Boltanski puts it.Luc Boltanski, La souffrance à distance (Paris: Métailié, 1993). For Sontag and Boltanski, photographs of suffering allow the experience of others to be straightforwardly used as commodity; through cultural representations of suffering, experience is removed, thinned out, and often instrumentalized for various agendas, even laudable ones. Drawing directly from life resists this medial collapse, because it always brings the viewer back to the embodied experience of the artist. Victoria LomaskoDessin de la série | sketch from the series, A Trip to Bishkek, 2014.Photo : permission de l’artiste | courtesy of the artist Armed with only a sketchbook and markers, Lomasko slips into various settings and undertakes an intimate kind of documentation that is both grounded in empathy and induces it. Empathy, the ability to perceive, feel, share, or understand the emotions of others,A single definition of empathy has never been agreed upon. Susanne Leiberg and Silke Anders discuss nine different definitions in “The Multiple Facets of Empathy: A Survey of Theory and Evidence,” Prog Brain Res 156 (2006): 419 — 40. In “Empathy-related Responses to Depicted People in Art Works,” Frontiers in Psychology 8, article 228 (2017), www.frontiersin.org, Ladislav Kesner and Jiˇri Horáˇcek also describe inconsistencies with regard to usages of the term, which then complicates its discussion in relation to art, as it can be “used to refer to different things — from embodied projection into depicted bodies to feelings of compassion elicited by images.” is a response that may be triggered by both cultural and cognitive elements in an artwork. Subject, context, and personal disposition all play a role, as do all “affective affordances” that constitute a work: composition, point of view, style, colour, and so on.Kesner and Horáˇcek, 4.In their work on empathy-related responses to art, Ladislav Kesner and Jiři Horáček explain that “a key question related to our topic here concerns the problem of to what extent the capacity of an artistic or a non-artistic image to elicit an empathic response depends on the viewer’s belief in the psychological reality of the depicted event.”Ibid., 7. But this “reality effect” is not in any way bound with naturalism or mimetic transparency. In Lomasko’s work, it is achieved by close cropping, focus on the subject’s face and body, and the immediacy of the line, which translates her own presence. Spontaneous sketches hold a special kind of authenticity for the artist. They call attention to the moment of their own making — to the act of witnessing by the artist, an act that takes into account the complexity and specificity of places, contexts, and people and involves a sensitivity to others. This effect is accentuated by the mundanity of the gestures and of the objects that crowd the representations, as well as the paradoxical banality of the words inscribed. These seemingly insignificant elements reveal that Lomasko took the time to get to know her subjects as individuals, experiencing their situation in an intimate and subjective way. This empathetic kind of reality effect is what allows the images to resist the trivialization of the experiences that they recount. Lomasko’s graphic reportages create a contemporary portrait of the post-Soviet world. They cast light on issues that are altogether avoided by state-dominated media: chronic economic distress, brutal nationalism and the influence of the Orthodox Church, censorship, and the sclerosing effects of the stranglehold of Putin’s government and the oligarchs on the political and economic life of the region. This militant posture has consequences in Russia. After the Pussy Riot trials, and that of Voina, Pyotr Pavlensky, and other dissident artists and curators, few galleries and publishers are willing to take the risk of showing works that are critical of the current regime, or that contradict with a documentary flair Russian mainstream media.During a meeting held in December 2016 with members of the art and theatre communities, Vladimir Putin defended artistic freedom and asserted that any kind of interference with theatre or exhibitions is absolutely inadmissible in Russia. Referring to the 2015 terrorist attacks on the French satirical journal Charlie Hebdo, which resulted in the death of twelve individuals, he then insisted that artists have a responsibility to not, under any circumstance, offend religious beliefs or produce works that could prove to be divisive. As a result, Lomasko’s drawings are simply not shown in her home country. They circulate in book format (printed abroad), and are presented in exhibitions in Europe and the U.S. in ways that showcase traces of the hand-held marker. They are torn from the artist’s sketchbooks and pinned to a wall, or sometimes reproduced directly onto the gallery wall as temporary murals by the artist herself. Victoria Lomasko has given herself an ethically weighted mission, which is to chronicle her own time, at street level, with openness and empathy. For Sontag, “Remembering is an ethical act, has ethical value in and of itself.”Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Picador, 2003), 115. Taking visibility away from people and keeping their plight out of public opinion, as Russian media outlets try to do, allows oppression and marginalization to continue. Lomasko’s drawings create an awareness of the complex reality, hardships, and struggles that others experience, and furthermore they mobilize and contribute to breaking isolation. They bear witness to the fact that at least one person cares enough to listen, to draw, to name, to share, and to continue chronicling her time with enduring empathy. Annie Gérin, Victoria Lomasko

Victoria Lomasko and the Graphic Language of Empathy

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