A few years ago, I disembarked a bus in western Ukraine at an internal checkpoint. Two guards in camoflage asked for my passport. One left to run the passportnumber. The other remained, looking on as the other passengers smoked, ate, and kicked at gravel.
Then, suddenly, I heard the telltale buzz: A small four-prop drone was hovering overhead, also keeping watch.
I remember feeling alarm. I glanced around the sky. Then I looked at the guard, who remained nonchalant. We were in Ukraine’s far western reaches on a militarily insignificant byway. Both pieces of evidence helped me dismiss my anxiety. Of course it wasn’t a Russian drone; there was no threat or danger, I thought.
The whole episode lasted barely a minute. I got my passport again, the bus moved on through the barricade. But I remember the drone because I’d never been in personal proximity to this kind of military-use device. I’ve wondered why, as my initial reaction, I looked around at the sky. Why was this my first response when I’d had no other direct experiences to draw on for guidance?
A drone-ified world
This year, I met artist and activist Dariia Kuzmych (www.dariiakuzmych.com) at Central European University’s Institute for Advanced Study in Budapest, where she was an Artist in Residence. Her current project follows wounded Ukrainian soldiers as they recover, offering them a frame to reimagine and play around with difficult aspects of their experience by artistic means and assistance. “As a counterpoint to trauma,” Dariia writes about her research at various rehabilitation centers and even a frontline-city hospital, “the imaginative and creative process, as well as humor, can open one’s own potentiality on a new path.”
In her other work, Dariia creates installations that confront the embodied, experiential reality of living in a drone-ified world. How have drones changed fundamental elements of perception, like the experience of time or dwelling in space?
Stitching the Sky, the installation we focused on in our conversation, calls on the viewer to imaginatively repair their experience of a drone-ified world. The sky, for some, is a shelter or canopy. Others look into the vast expanse to feel small and ponder the virtue of humility. Still others see birds dart and soar, and they feel free. But in Ukraine, drones dominate the sky.
What does a drone-filled sky invite us to feel and think?
In May, I visited with Dariia at Kyiv’s Zygzag Cafe to talk about Stitching the Sky. Our conversation was wide-ranging. We strayed onto questions of culture and politics, decolonization, and the artistic work of collaboration. Read on for interview excerpts and reflections on art about drones.
Stitching the Sky
Dariia’s oeuvre circles around the theme of temporal perception, and how the lived experience of time’s passing can be a medium for creatively reimagining broader processes like colonization and technological and political transformation.
Stitching the Sky harkens back to a Soviet-era monumental work that dwells on the same themes. But Stitching critically reimagines the Soviet colonial mindset. Between 1938 and 1939, Soviet-Russian artist Aleksander Deineka designed “24 Hours Over Soviet Sky,” a socialist realist celebration of military technological dominance. Deineka’s monumental installation at the Mayakovskaya metro station in Moscow has twenty-four mosaic panels, one for every hour. Each one has a plane flying over a different idyllic scene of Soviet society: farmers smiling, children frolicking, factories churning out the future.
Deineka’s mosaic planes purported to describe the Soviet Union’s militarily defensive posture at a time when the capitalist West, according to state propaganda, threatened invasion and imperialism. But the Soviet Union’s defensive posture, evoked in Deineka’s work, masked its opposite: “This meaning is twisted,” Dariia says, “Readiness for aggression is forged under the guise of defence.
The original mosaic embraces a totalitarian aesthetic, Dariia says during our conversation at Zygzag. “It is militarized time, occupied time. Totalitarian time. Every hour of upward gaze is accounted for.”
Dariia explains that Stitching the Sky also has a subtitle, which isn’t in the catalogue precis on her website: “To shoot down the wing’s arrows.” Arrow signifies the plane’s wings; in Ukrainian, “arrow” is also the word for the hands of a clock.
“The whistle of a rocket remains lodged in the sphere of thought, leaving its marks long after. There are precisely regimented intervals of the sky’s clockface above us, divided by wings. The air is clamped in suspense, awaiting the next rupture—flight.”
- Excerpt from the catalog precis of Stitching the Sky.
“Today in Ukraine,” Dariia says, “we live from attack to attack. The arrows that circle the clock are the wings of the planes - the drones and missiles that structure our time. What Russia is doing is continuous, our attention is always occupied. You are under this pressure to build your life under the expanding catastrophe. This is occupied attention, occupied time.”
Stitching the Sky recasts Deineka’s triumphant plane as a casualty of war, falling in flames from the sky, to bring forth the imaginative work of decolonizing time. To de-occupy temporal awareness, Dariia says, requires us to work within the imaginative realm itself. We work there to bring down these weapons.
“This is not a real plane, neither the original nor the one in my work.” While doing historical research Deineka’s mosaics, Dariia discovered that he hadn’t used a real-life model. His plane was a pastiche of various models and prototypes. This appealed to her, based on her goal of repurposing this colonializing, totalitarian image: “It is a generalized image of a ‘plane.’ It is all aircraft and no aircraft at the same time.”
Because the imagination is a medium where the artist and the viewer should be doing the work of decolonization. “We are shooting down this occupied time, something that forces us to be frightened and in terror. This ideology hangs over us. It looms over us. So we are shooting it down in its broadest meaning, as a colonizing ‘force.’”
Collaborating across generations
Dariia first created her reworked version of Deineka’s plane in 2015 when she was still an art student. But she remounted and reimagined the piece in 2025 by including it in a new installation designed and executed with her mother, Svitlana Selezneva.
Selezneva has worked mainly in artwear or wearable art: embroidery and clothing and jewelry design. This wasn’t their first collaboration. Selezneva had contributed to Dariia’s project Diploma thesis, an autobiographical reflection on artistic production amid the political and economic changes in Ukraine since the 1980s.
Initially, they worked more in parallel than in collaboration. They also discovered their different work speeds and rhythms, with Dariia taking time to think and her mother producing very quickly.
“I learned how to sew,” Dariia recalled during our conversation. “I’m still not as good as she is, but I got better at the technique. She also made crucial decisions about how to execute ideas in Stitching the Sky.“
“I was amazed at how she was so precise, because I’m never so detailed. So I said, ‘Let’s play around with this idea, using different techniques.’ I like dialogue that emerges together like this.”
More fundamentally, Dariia says, their practice of collaboration, now stretching back years, has shifted their broader creative repertoires and styles. Dariia included textile into her growing spectrum of methods. For Svitlana, working in the genre of conceptual art made available new constellations of ideas, while she also expanded beyond textile art’s two-dimentionality into a three-dimensional spatial medium.
The project of imaginative decolonization, embodied in Stitching the Sky, appealed to Selezneva on a personal level, too. After all, Selezneva had grown up in the Soviet Union and was deeply formed and shaped by the project of Russian colonization of Ukrainian culture. Dariia recalled conversations with her mother who spoke of Stitching as a process of transforming painful traumatic history into a symbolic demolishment.
“To portray the plane on a downward arc,” Dariia says, “damaged and burning, it’s a way of returning freedom to our experience of the sky, but not just the physical sky. Freedom also in the horizon of our thinking.”
Can the colonizers’ visual language be used to decolonize?
Was it a daring move, I ask Dariia, for a Ukrainian to reproduce the work of a Soviet-Russian artist? After all, in Ukraine the main direction of art runs away from subject matters that remind people of the Soviet past. For Dariia, however, evoking Deineka’s mosaic plane was necessary in 2015 when she completed Stitching the Sky’s mosaic element.
At the time, she was studying at Kyiv’s National Art Academy. The curriculum and even the teachers’ own methods were structurally rooted in the Soviet tradition. They had only made a superficial break with the past, by creating works that used Ukrainian national or Christian imagery.
“This was a first wave of decommunization,” Dariia told me, referring to the original mosaic and the later Stitching the Sky collaboration. “People were taking down statues and demolishing murals. But the institutions themselves were still deeply embedded in the traditions that had to be demolished. Both works examine these coexisting contradictions and ideologies.”
In the end, Dariia refuses anything less than a full accounting of history’s messy complexities: “The entire system, all the way down to the visual language, is intertwined with what we are trying to fight against. Only with a sincere gaze in the mirror, only with a true recognition of history, can we start to be free from it.”
Drones, not so funny anymore
News media in Europe and the US is obsessed with AI. AI occupies an outsized place in the public imagination as the auspicatory sign of the future, no matter if that future is halcyon or dystopic. But what about drones? As Dariia Kuzmych says, drone technology is also reshaping everyday sensory experience; but in the public conversation the work drones are doing on human experience seems much less significant than AI, even though some of these machines actually operate using AI. Why are drones seen to be less impactful than AI?
We used to laugh about drones and their silly antics. Do you remember the viral video of the wedding photographer learning to fly a drone? The hapless man flew the drone right into the happy couple. Ouch. This famous “wedding crasher drone” video was posed 11 years ago.
In Ukraine, the case of the “wedding crasher drone” is no longer a pratfall but rather an intentional and horrific tactic. Today’s dystopian version of the Wedding Crasher Drone, in Ukraine’s wartime lingo, is the “Human Safari.” Russians often use drones to “hunt” busses, cars, and even pedestrians. Dariia sent me a British Broadcasting Company video of a drone hunting a produce delivery truck in Kherson. Drones have brought the barbaric and terrifying into Ukrainians’ banal everyday.
Today, on social media, we are still laughing at new machines, but this time it’s robots.
In one video, a man wearing a motion-sensor suit directs a robot. The machine mimics the handler through a series of martial arts moves. Then the robot accidentally kicks the handler. The robot, still following the directions, doubles over in a strange mimicry of the man’s pain.
AI-powered robots, not drones, are getting out of hand to the detriment of their human handlers. The detriment, however, manages to look beneficial. The robot executes a humbling takedown of an individual who purports to be showing the next step in technological mastery. The consequences of control are playful and harmless if not actually beneficial for revealing the all-too-human flaws of the world’s technological whiz kids.
In the US, I don’t think we’ve graduated far beyond the pratfall stage in our public cultural understanding of drones. But as Dariia Kuzmych taught me, drones have evolved and they have taught Ukrainians to have a very different experiential awareness.
Will the public mockery of robotic pratfalling, as it did for drones a decade ago, precede technological advance and militarization? We may be tempted to ask society’s technological overlords, in a mood of mockery or dystopian anxiety, what role AI robots will play in the next stage of militarization. But I think it would be just as beneficial to ask the artists about the future. How can we return a lived environment, once it’s been changed by technology, into a more humanely livable world?