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Depicting Genocide: 20th Century Responses to the Holodomor This exhibition was made possible by a grant from the New Jersey Council for the Humanities, a state partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this exhibition do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities or the New Jersey Council for the Humanities.

© 2023 by the Ukrainian History and Education Center, all rights reserved.

Depicting Genocide: 20th Century Responses to the Holodomor

The Holodomor was an extremely unnatural disaster. It was a famine that was not simply a result of bad weather, poor harvests, or overzealous collectivization efforts. It was even more than just a famine, though that itself was horrifying. Rather, it was part of a broad campaign to quash any residue of Ukrainian autonomy and self-determination by attacking the deepest sources of that identity: language, culture, and traditions centered on agriculture and the land. As such, is one of the sharpest "before and after" demarcation points in modern Ukrainian history.

Understanding the Holodomor requires not just a study of the famine, but also a broader look at the period and the history that immediately preceded it.

"Depicting Genocide" opens during the 90th anniversary of the Holodomor. It also opens as Russia continues its war of aggression against Ukraine, during which genocide is is yet again being perpetrated. It explores some of the ways in which the Holodomor was depicted during the 20th century, particularly though art.

The artistic depiction of genocide is challenging. Should horrors be depicted directly and graphically — with skeletons or dead bodies? Or should the approach be more understated, providing the viewers or readers with just enough to allow them to create the images of horror in their own minds? This exhibition explores the extremely varied approaches that artists over more than seven decades have used to tackle the Holodomor.

While many artists and writers were quick to create a substantial body of work about other genocides (such as the Holocaust), depictions of the Holodomor were remarkably sparse prior to the last decade of the 20th century. The Ukrainian History and Education Center is honored to have a significant number of these early works in its permanent collection, and this exhibition is built around those items. The exhibition also includes period primary sources that shed light on the Holodomor as a historical event, how it was portrayed in the press, and how Ukrainians in the diaspora responded to it.

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This page references:

What was the Holodomor?