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Oksana Shachko was a Ukrainian artist and activist whotook her ownlife in her apartment near Paris this past July.
Shachko, 31, was a co-founder of the protest-performance collectiveFemen(although they later became estranged).
The last time I saw Oksana Shachko was this past July.
Ukraine was in a state of emergency.
As in all states of emergency, countermeasures must be radical.
Ukraine was mired in the kleptocratic post-Soviet mobster-run economy.
Public resources, which included just about everything, went to strongmen for fractions upon fractions of their worth.
Infrastructure collapsed, and with it, the fabric of society was left flapping and tattered.
It was choking them.
This was the context of Oksanas childhood.
As she told the tale: Her father, a factory worker and coin collector, lost his job.
His life became a drinking, synapse-rotting sedentary one.
He was lulled into a state of nothingness.
Her mother was also fired from the factory making propaganda posters where she was an artist in the 1980s.
Lives were shattered, but communism had been defeated!
In that psychic and literal rubble, Ukraines new millennials were forged.
Some sought meaning in various flavors of ultranationalism.
Oksana was in the latter group.
There was every problem to address.
Among the urgencies was the emerging sex-slavery economy some forced, some ostensibly voluntary.
Oksana and I attempted to console her, offering a spare bedroom, and sympathy.
Later in the evening there was a ruckus in the hall.
Oksana, her face gravely serious, came to observe the scene.
You want to die?
Just fucking die then.
She proceeded to fire up the floor-to-ceiling windows and climbed over the balcony railing.
This is how you die!
You want I let go?
I was terrified and begging her to come back inside.
The visiting friend stopped toying with suicide.
Oksana was an artist, trained from 8 years old by a master iconographer.
She was heralded as a prodigy, doing public work in churches and selling icons by age 12.
The highly coded and symbolic language of the icons were absorbed as any child absorbs a language.
The nuances understood, and the lessons tied to a rigid, dogmatic church-ruled ideology.
She wanted to become a nun, but her mother convinced the precocious preadolescent out of it.
She became an atheist.
I might ask.Owlin Russian is , which is pronounced like the French cava.In French Cava?
Where do you start in a ruined society?
One transversal element in this array of catastrophes in Ukraine was a patriarchy.
The mobsters were men.
The new czars didnt give a fuck about human suffering, and less about the lives of women.
Young women were met with nothing, or a sort of disinterested ridicule.
Oksana knew that new tactics were required to overcome this voicelessness.
The deep training in religious propaganda was an asset.
She developed a language that used the only thing that women in Ukraine had to sell: their bodies.
From this Femen was born.
And with it Oksana invented a new language.
It was peaceful, but it was powerful.
And with that, she cast the male gaze back on itself.
Now they had a voice.
They became somebody, by dressing wrong.
Oksanas points of view were not radical; they were practical.
She observed power, and understood it very well.
Her reactions to complex questions would often be two- or three-word responses: Read Lenin.
The brevity and apparent severity of her responses earned her one of our private nicknames, Klitschko.
As international boxing champions, they are perfect symbols of Ukraines gangster systems.
I would ask.No, I work, she might answer.Klitschko, I would say.
The moments she was unguarded, intimate with thoughts, emotions, and language, were rare and precious.
She was never depriving others of this intimacy; she deprived it of herself.
Yet sentimentality, perhaps her least favorite emotion, could creep up upon her.
NeedWantLoveShe once tagged on my kitchens water heater.
It was a message she would occasionally send to my phone.
The growth of Femen into a global movement iswell-documented, and I will not tell their story here.
It was easy to fall in love with her, and she was incredibly photogenic.
In Margots film, we see the whip-smart, spontaneous joker that she could be.
We see how they planned their actions.
She did not lose this habit, even after her exclusion from Femen.
Oksana was forced to flee Ukraine in 2014.
She had spent time in many of Europes jails.
She had been disappeared and beaten in a Belarusian forest after being doused in gasoline.
He didnt get any Femen.
I also knew that she desperately wanted to.
She generally put others first.
But peace and beauty could also emerge on her face from simple things.
The French chapter of the Femen story is sordid and stupid.
A power struggle within a group that struggled against power.
Oksana quite reasonably decided to walk away, after being told to do so.
Her gift for propaganda continued to inform her work after her departure from Femen.
She remained an outsider, a communist-cum-anarchist believing in flat autonomous systems.
In a state of emergency, you dont ask; you take.
Her answer was simply: Because its not news.
Last December, we went to see a Ryoji Ikeda installation at the Almine Rech gallery in Paris.
It was a massive and immersive piece, in some ways the opposite of Oksanas highly coded icons.
Yet it is all staged in the beautified formal language of her Orthodox training.
It is magic and engaging, and powerful.
Suddenly, at the Ikeda installation, the room started flashing violently, light, dark.
I covered Oksanas eyes and guided her out of the room.
I was afraid it would trigger her epilepsy.
Perhaps it contributed to her urgency, and the desire for immediacy in her imagery.
I was always looking for things to show or share with her.
Perhaps the best example of this is a poem, an episodic and lengthy one, heretofore anonymous.
It embraced anti-imperialist and anti-nationalist positions, and called to fight the brutality of unfettered capitalism.
The interconnection of these struggles was not lost on her, and her artwork underscored this global fight.
Painting became a solitary act, and she a lone revolutionary.
There was loneliness for the new artist-revolutionary, painting in her studio.
She was seen as a Femen, but Femen was no longer her.
Femens new leaders worked to exclude her and Sasha, two of the three founders.
Her vision of a flat organization with a plug-and-play universalism had become corrupted.
In her vision, anyone could be a leader of Femen, anywhere.
She had developed the tool kit.
She had a larger-picture understanding that placed feminism in a grander context of revolution for everyone.
By reclaiming the commons.
By working for a picture of justice that wasnt cleaved into special interests or distracted by fashions.
She was a revolutionary artist who could not keep fighting.
The work should fight on.
We should fight on.
Oksana loved to dance.
It is a kind of side-to-side motion of the head in a near figure eight.
She was feeling for others, and fighting for others.
She understood the harrowing stress of poverty.
It was beautiful to watch her dance.
We lost an inventor and a master propagandist.
I lost the woman I loved.
She did it all in abject poverty but rich with a world of ideas.
She did it without ever hating anyone; she was full of love, for men and women alike.
The bureaucratic process of becoming a normalized Parisian was tedious and painful.
A political refugee, she had no passport; she could not travel.
French civil authorities welcomed her then ignored her.
In short, she had nothing except her clothes and her paintings, and her friends.
This was not enough.
How should she be remembered?
Her visual grammar made Ukrainian and Russian gangsters tremble in their boots.
They wanted to silence them, tame them, and jail them forever.
Or, at the very least, correct their dressing habits.
The Femen founders fled.
They got away but Oksana never really did.
She changed the way we see, and act.
She changed all of us.
Thank you, Jaba.
It is a dark, moody, and entirely unfinished piece, and it was her favorite.
The effect was immediate, sending the room into a deep wave of anguish and tears.
None of us could believe the reason we were gathered together it felt entirely impossible.
The room was filled with sunflowers.
What is it about sunflowers?
I will posit this: Sunflowers are hopeful.
They have come to symbolize an optimism, a readiness.
The music was a painful past.
The flowers, the future.
