We built this issue of “Konteksty” on the intuition that it is the texts of young Ukrainian women – researchers, artists and curators working on the fringes of academic writing – that resonate most strongly today. Their voice is loud and refreshing: critically problematizing the war and the art emerging in its shadow, they wrestle with Russia’s imperial legacy and the Western academy, while at the same time seeking the sources of thinking and writing in their own experience. “The writing subject” emerging from the texts produced over the past two years not only draws on her own experience and on decolonial-feminist traditions, but also sometimes boldly crosses the boundary between science and art, academic action or writing and artistic practices.

Therefore in this issue we give voice to Ukrainian researchers and artists. We revisit the first weeks of the war and its literary testimonies. We look at its languages and images, the war’s visual culture – including also the vernacular. We look at Donbas, revisiting the strategies of artists for whom the experience of Kyiv’s Maidan was crucial. In part, we reconstruct the ongoing debate about decolonization, imperial frameworks and “imperial innocence,” as well as the new place and definition of “Ukrainian studies,” and finally, “decolonial options” in thinking about the post-socialist legacy. We also reach back to the origins of modern Ukrainian art: to Les Kurbas (the Berezil Theater recently celebrated its centennial), Vasyl Yermilov, the Kharkiv School of Photography, and finally to the Lviv avant-garde. We look at Bucha and images of suffering. We frame war, violence and the powerlessness that accompanies them. The issue also contains a chapter dedicated to Maria Reimann, a cultural anthropologist and writer exploring topics such as disability and childhood, who died tragically in the summer of 2023.