Across the arts, creators are producing poignant, direct work at speed at the front line of Russia’s war of aggression
‘Kyiv is being bombed,” the message began, “and I’m not sure I’ll get another chance to do this. So here is the majority of my 2010-19 music that you may have never heard.” And then it ended with the words: “Death to Putin.” I read this on Bandcamp, on 25 February, the day after Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine. It was written by Timur Dzhafarov, better known as John Object, a maker of deconstructed club music. On that day, he gathered most of the music he has created since he started recording at the age of 15, put it into one big anthology, and published the lot under the title Life. Not long after, he was drafted into the Ukrainian army.
I learned about this collection from his Instagram account, which also carries Dzhafarov’s “war diaries”. He is one of the many Ukrainian artists from whom I have learned, among other gruesome things, what a battlefield looks like. Their reports are different from statistics and mainstream media feeds: they are very personal, direct, poignant.
