What interested me about Piers Secunda’s Nature Morte: The Extermination of Ukraine exhibition was its precision. It does not present Russia’s genocidal war in Ukraine as an abstract tragedy in which terrible things simply “happen”. It shows destruction as a structure, showing the people at the top who create its ideological permission, the officials who organise it, the institutions that normalise it, and the people at the bottom who carry it out.
The exhibition brings together 21 paintings of Ukrainian foods and their ingredients. Each contains a small QR code leading to an archive about Russian officials, military personnel and institutional figures connected to the looting of Ukrainian culture, the deportation and forced adoption of Ukrainian children, their militarisation inside Russian organisations, and the 2023 attack on Odesa Cathedral. The works are arranged in three pyramids and one vertical formation, each corresponding to a different part of this machinery.
The approach
Secunda produced the ink from charcoal gathered by British journalist Jerome Starkey from the ruins of the Kharkiv Regional State Administration building after it was struck during Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022. All 21 paintings were made with material from that destroyed building.
I believe this approach makes the works look restrained – the paintings do not initially announce themselves as images of atrocity. We recognise the food before we recognise the system attached to it, entering through something domestic, familiar and almost comforting.
Secunda builds the objects through dark outlines, repeated hatching, scratched marks, grey washes and heavy areas of gathered ink. The technique feels closer to drawing, illustration and printmaking than to polished photographic realism.
Хліб
There is a Ukrainian saying: “Хліб – усьому голова”. Literally, “Bread is the head of everything”. It means that bread comes before everything else. In Ukrainian culture, bread is not treated merely as an addition to a meal, I think it represents sustenance, work, land, harvest, hospitality and the continuation of life.
In Secunda’s pyramids, raw ingredients appear at the bottom, prepared dishes occupy the middle, and bread is placed at the top. For a Ukrainian viewer, the association with this proverb is immediate. Bread is physically positioned at the head of the structure, and the movement upward shows how culture is formed.
For example – one of the bread drawings (at the top of one formation) leads to Secunda’s PDF with patriarch Kirill, the head of the Russian orthodox church, who has given religious legitimacy to the invasion and whose church structures are identified as participants in systems surrounding forcibly deported Ukrainian children.
Symbol of the tragedy
I think that for Ukrainians, bread can never be politically innocent. Less than a century ago, the Soviet regime weaponised food during the Holodomor of 1932-33. Grain and other food were confiscated, villages were blockaded, and starving Ukrainians were prevented from leaving in search of survival. Hunger became a means of crushing the countryside, resistance and Ukrainian national life.
But the violence did not end with starvation. The catastrophe itself was subsequently pushed out of official history: even after Stalin’s death, Soviet historians could refer only to “food difficulties”, the use of the word ‘famine’ was forbidden. In Soviet Ukraine, it was not officially spoken of until 1987.
There is something particularly brutal in this sequence: first the food is taken away, then the words for what happened are taken away too. Bread therefore carries not only the memory of hunger, but also the memory of the decades spent trying to preserve the knowledge of that hunger.
Russia has already tried to destroy Ukrainians through bread, today it continues the same project through missiles, occupation, torture, deportation and the theft of Ukrainian children.
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We remember great images of war: ruins, executions, devastated landscapes. Goya drew atrocity directly. Picasso transformed the bombing of Guernica into fractured bodies and terror. Otto Dix returned from the First World War and made its mutilated bodies almost impossible to look away from. There is nothing inherently passive about depicting destruction.
But today a photograph can show a ruined apartment building within minutes of it being destroyed, and we see these images continuously. Painting the same ruin can preserve it, transform it or make us look again, but representation alone does not necessarily tell us who made the ruin, how it happened, or what system made it possible.
Secunda, rather than concentrating only on the visible aftermath of violence, turns towards its machinery. His documents hidden behind paintings reconnect actions to names, positions, organisations and careers. The people involved are not presented as abstract monsters outside society, but as people embedded within its institutions: ministers, administrators, church leaders, museum workers, teachers, police officers, military personnel and youth organisers.
Genocide does not require every participant to imagine themselves committing genocide. Each person can believe they are performing one limited task: signing a document, transporting a child, rewriting a textbook, cataloguing stolen art, repeating an official phrase.
For example in Kherson, Russian forces and pillaged museums, a cathedral and the regional archive before withdrawing from the city. Human Rights Watch documented an organised operation at the Kherson Regional Art Museum involving apparent art specialists and dozens of other people. Around 10,000 objects were taken from a collection of approximately 13,500 works.
This was not a frightened soldier stealing a souvenir, it required expertise, access, time, transport and organisation. It was curation in reverse. An erasure machine.
I thank Secunda for the seriousness and persistence with which he has approached Ukraine, particularly because so much contemporary art about war stops at the image of destruction. Nature Morte does something more difficult: it does not allow the crime to exist without its perpetrator, and perhaps this is what I found most important in the exhibition.
