SPOTLIGHT ON NEW SCJS FACULTY AFFILIATE YULIYA LANINA

By Dr. Rebecca Rossen

About a year ago, not long after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, I visited Yuliya Lanina’s home studio. The walls of the small space were covered floor to ceiling with pen and ink drawings that depicted scenes from the war. Ultimately, she would make hundreds of these drawings, which now comprise My Wailing Wall, an ever-expanding series through which she bears witness to the destruction this war has wrought.

Lanina, a multimedia artist of JewishRussian-Ukranian descent, was born in Moscow and immigrated to the U.S. in the early 1990s to escape antisemitic persecution. She is known for creating fanciful paintings of humanoid animals and plants, whimsical and creepy animatronic sculptures, and music boxes based on Russian folklore. She frequently transforms this work into surreal animations, installations, and performances that set her creations into motion.

Over the past couple of years, she has delved more deeply into her Jewish heritage, as well as issues related to body image, migration, and transgenerational trauma. In 1941, Lanina’s grandmother, father, and uncle miraculously survived the slaughter of all the Jews in their shtetl, Chudnov, which is about halfway between Kyiv and Lviv. The “Holocaust by bullets,” as it has come to be known, was the first phase of the Final Solution. Lanina relays this history in a moving stop-