Iryna iSky: Between War, Myth, and Memory

The UFDA Podcast episode with Iryna iSky is a conversation about how war, art, and personal memory can exist in parallel and amplify one another.

At the beginning of the episode, we trace Iryna’s background before the full-scale invasion: 25 years of dance, working as a choreographer and entrepreneur, moving to Kyiv, and reaching a point of professional burnout. A friend’s old camera and an impromptu photo session with a stray cat her son brought home launch a new chapter: she picks up the camera “just to try it” and ends up with a photography career that quickly gains momentum thanks to her unique approach to every person and almost obsessive involvement in the work.

In parallel, Iryna manages one of Kyiv’s major fight clubs and develops her skills in photographing movement and action — boxing, kickboxing, dynamic scenes. In her artistic life, she and her husband form an art duo and create their first joint exhibition, “Samotnist” (“Loneliness”), exploring the dual nature of solitude as both a space of inner fullness and a painful sense of isolation.

After the full-scale invasion, Iryna does not so much “decide to become a soldier” as recognize that her ability to capture movement and action can serve the army and future generations; she joins the military and continues to photograph, documenting the work of Ukrainian soldiers. In the episode, she shares the story of trying to photograph a missile launch: forty minutes standing in an open field in freezing cold, holding position for the sake of the right light, the rush of joy when she realizes the missile is in perfect focus — and only months later, with the lived experience of trenches and shelling, the realization of how dangerous that situation truly was.

She speaks about the difference between abstract fears and the kind of fear you encounter at war: not the fear of something that may or may not happen, but the knowledge that danger is almost guaranteed — and that you still have to go there and do your job.

Another important strand of the conversation is the experience of being a woman in the military. Iryna emphasizes that all women at the front are volunteers and that, long before they actually arrive in a unit, many of them face skepticism and resistance from their environment: if a man goes to war, the reaction is often “Well done, how can we help?”, whereas a woman hears, “Why do you need this? Why are you going there?” even at the stage of intention.

You also touch on stigmatizing comments in civilian life — like casually calling someone “shell-shocked” — and how this lands for a person who is simultaneously serving in the army and continuing to exist as an artist.

A crucial part of the episode is devoted to Iryna’s ongoing series of mythological female figures without faces, which you, as the host, describe as the primary visual thread through which you first came to know her work. Iryna explains why she removes the face: when we see a specific, recognizable face, we tend to perceive the figure as “someone else”; without it, it becomes easier to project ourselves onto the character and to find something personal in the image.

The material base for many of the costumes and works is a chest full of embroidery made by her grandmother and great-grandmother. As a child, she remembers a trunk nobody ever opened — only adding more textiles to it. When her mother mentions she might give the embroidery away, Iryna insists on taking everything. She restores, cuts, layers, and integrates these fragments into contemporary costumes and photographic works as a way of extending the life of both family and national heritage.

She speaks of combining heritage with a futuristic visual language as a “paper airplane into future generations” — a way of sending a message that preserves the context of “how it was” and “what is happening now”. At the same time, it is an instrument of resistance to Russia’s ongoing attempts to erase and distort Ukrainian history and culture, and to dominant global beauty standards: she opposes today’s idols with a reminder of the Trypillian Madonna — a Ukrainian archetype that predates any Hollywood mythology.

The conceptual core of the episode is Iryna’s project “Cube”, which she calls the most important project of her life so far. She describes it as a semi-transparent cube made of matte glass, four by four meters, standing in public space: you walk down a cold, grey street and suddenly see a softly glowing volume surrounded by golden wheat stalks.

Inside, multiple senses are engaged. You receive a small token at the entrance and step onto a golden-hued floor covered in shell casings with amber tips catching the light. You hear the ringing of copper tokens, feel the warmth of the light, and are invited to think of someone you have lost. Kneeling on one knee, you press your token into a form in the center of the floor — a gesture of respect for the dead and a way to imprint the emotional experience into an object you can carry with you.

The idea of “Cube” is to help the community transform the memory of the dead from a paralyzing wave of despair and frozen grief into a feeling of pride and inner continuation of their path. Instead of a minute of silence that locks us into mourning, Iryna imagines a minute of remembrance that gives the strength to go on. She speaks of the “Cube” as a mobile memorial that should travel to people rather than waiting for them to come — a space where the “souls of heroes” symbolically move through different cities and countries, witnessing that their sacrifice was not in vain.

In the episode, she also frankly addresses the practical side: the project has some partners but still needs support and patronage in order to be realized physically and to travel across Ukraine and abroad.

Later in the conversation, you shift to cinema and discuss Iryna’s experience as a costume designer for the film Kanatopska Vidma (“Kanatop Witch”). She recalls how the producers reached out after seeing her work in music videos and asked her to sketch how she envisions a contemporary witch — in five visual stages of transformation. Working online from the front, with the help of an assistant on set, she balances military service, medical recovery after a concussion, and the demands of a large-scale film production.

Iryna talks about the extensive research behind the costumes: consulting folklorists and historians, and even immersing herself in contemporary occult communities to understand how visual codes function today. One of her key discoveries is that, in the Slavic tradition before Christianity, there was neither “black magic” nor “hell” in the way we imagine them now; witches worked with protection, healing, and restoration rather than deliberate harm, and Ukrainian witches had specific visual traits — from small horns hidden under hair or a headscarf to a reversed reflection of the person they were looking at in their eyes.

She also describes working with captured Russian uniforms collected at the front: how different it felt to handle them not as a soldier but as an artist and Ukrainian woman, the physical revulsion she experienced, the need to clean the uniforms (no dry cleaner wanted to take them) and then re-weather them, and the responsibility of not passing that “energy” directly onto the actors.

Towards the end of the episode, you return to the question of “what next” and whether Iryna can imagine her practice after the war. Her answer is simple and radical: she wants to live, not merely survive. For now, her art is both a means of survival and a voice for states that cannot yet be articulated in words.

She talks about the exhibition “Vichni” (“Eternals”), which she created together with her team without grants, patrons, or state support — and about the exhaustion that followed, when she thought, “this is my last project, I can’t do this anymore”. Sitting alone in the exhibition hall, surrounded by towering figures in costumes that “look back at her”, she realizes she has done it by herself — and then hears an inner voice cutting through her fatigue: “Okay, I’ll have a smoke — and I’ll do it.”

The episode ends with your support and belief that the “Cube” will be realized in the near future, and with a shared sense that simply “living” is not enough — that the taste of life is in creating, even when it feels almost impossible.