Farewell to a Free Spirit (with 8/17/18 update and Addendum)

Oksana Shachko (January 31, 1987- July 23, 2018)

"... I was deeply inside the religious world and very concentrated on my craft. It started to take off for me. At ten years old I had already started painting in churches and exhibiting my art. I was deeply inside all these institutional bodies, and because of it, I started believing in God. I always went to Church to pray. When I was twelve years old I decided to go live in the church, to paint icons and spend my life praying. I wanted to stop living a normal life and become a monk.

... (but) I started to think that I didn’t want to overwhelm my parents with stress, so I decided to stay. At that moment, I started to think about the meaning of believing. It was a big paradox for me. My parents are religious, they believe in God, they go the Church… But they refuse that I become a monk. I didn’t understand. I continued living with my parents and started searching for an answer to my questions. I continued painting icons but started engaging in more conversations with the people surrounding me. I wanted to know why they came and prayed in front of these icons. I also starting becoming critical of the Church. When I was fourteen, I found a group of young people from fifteen to twenty years old who organized philosophical clubs out of school... They were very critical of religion. I found them very interesting. I started to come more and more and read their books. I discussed religion with them and continued to say, “God exists,” wanting to prove it to them. One year passed, two years passed, and I became a total atheist...

Oxana and Sasha Shevchenko,
Kiev, 2013

... At this time, I met with Anna Hustol and Sasha Shevchenko with whom I created Femen. I never thought about feminism before. In Ukraine, feminism is never talked about. We had a lot of meetings with professors, the University director, the mayor, and some businessmen to gather money for the students. When I went to see those people, I was accompanied by a guy and they only listened to him. That was not normal. When I was seventeen, I started to get very angry about this with the other girls. That’s when we decided to create a girl movement, to prove to everybody that we are able to create, to do things, and to work."

- Excerpt from: A Meeting with Oksana Shachko,  a November, 2017 interview with Armelle Leturcq for Crash magazine from which the photograph of Oxana (inset left) was taken. The icon in the background - featuring the Virgin Mary wearing a burqa while breast-feeding the infant Christ - is her own work; a detail of which is shown later in this post. Inset right is a detail of a photograph found here.

"During the five years she was in Femen, Shachko was arrested dozens of times, interrogated, allegedly abused by police and spent almost a year in jail. She was also one of the members who was allegedly kidnapped in Belarus in 2011 after protesting the Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko during a topless rally. Shachko and other members said they were forced to strip naked in the woods, were beaten, had oil poured on them and were threatened to be set on fire." 

- From Oxana's Huffington Post obituary.

***

Oksana Shachko (or Oxana, as she preferred) was an almost fragile young woman... slightly built and diminutive, but, at the same time, striking enough to have been a model, and fierce enough to have been a prize-fighter. She showed great skill as an artist at a very early age, and was groomed as a painter of religious icons: a highly traditional and stylized genre of image-making that left little room for personal expression. As a prepubescent girl, she was spiritual to such a degree that she came very close to entering a monastery.

However, by the latter half of her teens all this would change. She would question the validity of religion and turn to atheism. She would question her position as the subordinate female of the species and turn to feminism. She would question her own convictions in relation to the apathy she found in her native Ukraine and turn to activism. Ultimately, in 2008, she would help organize a small band of Ukrainian feminists. They called themselves "FEMEN" and set in motion a series of outrageous, theatrical demonstrations in response to the political, patriarchal and demoralizing injustices to women they observed in both Western and Middle Eastern societies. Inset right below: Oxana at work.

Unfortunately, FEMEN was not an entirely successful experiment. The women were often berated, humiliated, beaten and imprisoned. And, although they gained enough notoriety to make headlines worldwide - consistently photographed by male members of the press - they failed to make a favorable impression on a number of their fellow feminists who - with a few exceptions - managed to miss the point.

And, it got worse. In a 2016 interview, Oxana reflected: "After our protest against the elections in Russia, I was detained for two weeks. In the police department, I was blamed for everything and deported. From then on, I was denied entry to Russia, for life. We were arrested after every action in Ukraine but never were deported of course, because we were the citizens of the country. Yet our activism became physically impossible. In the end, we were accused of preparing a terrorist attack against Putin and the Patriarch Cyrill. They planted weapons, bombs, and also the portraits of these two beauties. Within one day... we managed to escape from Ukraine."