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This talk explores the labor of art in light of gender inequalities within the Ukrainian contemporary art sphere. Born in Ukraine, Alisa Lozhkina entered the contemporary art milieu at twenty-one, drawn to the ethos of freedom and transgression embodied by a slightly older cohort. Her attraction lay not in the artistic production itself, but in the proposition of an alternative mode of existence characterized by the subversion of conventional routines.
Lozhkina’s professional trajectory encompassed roles as curator, critic, editor-in-chief of an art periodical, chief curator, and deputy director of a major exhibition institution, and author of several monographs on contemporary art. Concurrent with her career development, Ukrainian contemporary art underwent transformation from a marginal formation into a booming cultural sector.
Through sustained engagement, Lozhkina came to realize that the promise of freedom remained unrealized in her lived experience. Her positionally as a woman and cultural worker revealed a different reality: occupying subordinate positions while being constructed as an "authority figure” experiencing systematic economic precocity, and navigating continuous mediation between competing egos and institutional interests.
The career path of the cultural worker in Ukraine—particularly for women—remains characterized by profound structural inequities, yet successive cohorts of young women continue to pursue this vocation. Lozhkina’s talk interrogates the mythological frameworks sustaining the conceptualization of artistic labor as selfless service. It wonders what mythology sustains this idea of art as selfless service? Why does it persist, and who does it benefit? And what, if anything, can be done to change this condition?
Alisa Lozhkina is a Ukrainian-born, California-based art historian, curator, and artist. She is the author of The Art of Ukraine (Thames & Hudson, 2024). Lozhkina has curated major contemporary art exhibitions at leading international institutions and held senior roles within Ukraine’s art infrastructure. As an artist, she works primarily with textiles, creating quilts and dolls as vessels of memory, myth, and embodied experience. Her current scholarly work focuses on the role of psychedelics in the Ukrainian art community after the collapse of the USSR.
