Soлomiya no. 3 – Érika Nimis

[Winter 2025]

Soлomiya no. 3
Kyiv, Berlin, SHIFT BOOKS, 2024, 132 pages

[EXCERPT]

“War but art” is the motto of Soлomiya, a new independent, internationally distributed magazine– created in Kyiv and designed in Berlin – in response to Russia’s massive invasion of Ukraine. In September 2023, when I was in Lviv in western Ukraine, I met the two founders of Soлomiya in the café in the municipal art centre.1 Vsevolod Kazarin (born in the Luhansk region, 2000) and Sebastian Wells (born in Berlin, 1996), both of them photographers, had met in Kyiv a year earlier. Together, they started to cover the transformations taking place in the city in its resistance to the Russian aggression, and soon they began to think about how to continue and expand their collaboration. They created an NGO, the Soлomiya Collective (Solomiya, a Ukrainian female first name),2 and its epony­mous project, a magazine about art in the time of war. The first issue, self-published, came out in June 2022 (with a print run of 1,500, now sold out) with the support of the Berlin Academy of Arts and the Ostkreuz Photography Agency, of which Wells is a member.

[ Complete issue, in print and digital version, available here: Ciel variable 128 – CHANGE OF SCENE ]
[ Complete article in digital version available here: Soлomiya no. 3 – Érika Nimis]

Notes

  1. 1 The Lviv Art Center is one of the city’s most important cultural spaces. See www.lvivart.center/en/.
  2. 2 This innocuous-seeming title signifies hope and determination: Soлomiya, associated with perseverance, resilience, crea­tivity, and curiosity, is a variation on the name Salomé, which means “peace” in Hebrew.