Vjeran Pavlaković¹

Just as street art and murals have become a global phenomenon due to social media and a new generation of urban artists, the muralization of war has increasingly been used for creating sites of memory for past conflicts or generating support for ongoing armed struggles. Many post-conflict states (Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Spain, Northern Ireland) have seen a shift from traditional monuments towards new artistic forms, including street art, that function as memorial spaces. Although many remain bottom-up endeavors, in other cases government institutions and organizations finance large “mnemonic murals” in order to reinforce dominant narratives, such as in Poland and the legacies of the Second World War, including the Warsaw Uprising and Soviet crimes. While graffiti accompanied the wars of the 20th century (from GIs scrawling “Kilroy was here” across Europe to the shockingly graphic scratchings found in the Dutchbat base outside of Srebrenica), street art and murals as sites of memory are a much more recent phenomenon. Since the beginning of the Ukrainian – Russian conflict in 2014, and even more since the full-scale invasion in 2022, street art and mnemonic murals have been used during the war to raise international support for Ukraine, strengthen morale on the homefront, and create new memoryscapes of both civilian and military casualties. This contribution seeks to analyze the role of art, specifically street art, in the perception and representation of the Ukrainian conflict internationally, while placing the muralization processes within the broader context of art, war, and memory. 
 

Political Graffiti and Mnemonic Murals

Although graffiti has been around for thousands of years, graffitology as a scientific discipline is fairly new. Whereas there are now many useful historical overviews,² academic journals,³ and multidisciplinary approaches to graffiti and street art – historians, ethnographers, anthropologists, geographers, art historians, legal specialists, and many other scholars are engaged in new research methodologies – I am seeking to apply the theories of memory studies to this media. Graffiti can be painted, sprayed, scratched, stenciled, or scrawled in many other ways, but fundamentally consist of letters and texts. Graffiti writers and artists often stylize their texts as a means for visual communication with other graffiti writers, rather than for a broader audience, but their ultimate goal is to be present as much as possible in the public space. A subsection of graffiti includes political graffiti, which relies very little on aesthetics, but is important in conveying ideologically charged messages, especially under repressive regimes or during conflicts and rapid political transitions.⁴ Graffiti, and political graffiti particularly, are often illegal, subversive, and treated as vandalism by the law. Although some scholars consider street art to fall under the broad category of graffiti, I think it is more useful to consider it separately due to its primarily figurative visual language that can be accompanied by texts, but not necessarily. Both graffiti and street art tend to be 2D interventions in public space, although new technology allows innovative forms to develop, while an increasing number of museums and galleries have taken “street art” off the streets and into the high end art world, such as the internationally famous postmodernist provocateur, Banksy. Modern graffiti emerged from New York City in the 1960s, and eventually spread around the world. In the last decade, the creation and dissemination of graffiti and street art has exploded, in part due to the ability of social media to easily share images. Tucson’s most famous muralist, Joe Pagac, reflected on the very beginning of his career when images of his street art were popping up on Instagram, which launched a wave of commissions from store owners who wanted people posing in front of their businesses.⁵ He later turned to public art, but the initial boost was from owners seeking to get free advertising through trendy murals. The commodification of graffiti and street art is such that mainstream companies, from telecommunication services to urban clothing chains, use the imagery and style, and even media, of these art forms.

Street art can be just as subversive and illegal as graffiti, such as stenciled images of hated politicians or revolutionary symbols such as the clenched fist of Otpor from Serbia, but increasingly city administrations and governments around the world fund street art as part of urban beautification processes, combat against gang graffiti, gentrification initiatives, or even top-down official memory work. Murals and other forms of street art that function as sites of memory, i.e., mnemonic murals, are the focus of this particular essay about the visual strategies of creating support for Ukraine. Mnemonic murals can include community leaders; famous politicians or activists; athletes, celebrities, and artists; and common people that might not be officially recognized on a traditional monument. As long as there is some historical, political, or biographical connection to the mural, it can function just as any other site of memory.⁶ Drawing upon some examples from the former Yugoslavia, which is seeing an explosion of mnemonic murals, I want to expand the analytical frame and apply it to the much more dynamic contemporary situation in Ukraine, especially since the full-blown aggression by Putin’s Russia that began in 2022. 

War, Art and Memory

Art and propaganda has accompanied war at least since the French Revolution, while warriors have been carving their names into places they’ve conquered or visited for millennia (such as the viking graffiti in the Hagia Sophia). The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) resulted in one of the most active cultural responses ever seen during a military conflict. Painters, sculptors, writers, and photographers all got involved in the struggle, even though only a few of them participated actively on the battlefield. The Spanish Civil War was the first mass media conflict: compact cameras, radios, newsreels, newspapers, and posters all reached newly accessible global audiences. Local and international artists became militants and vocal supporters of the embattled sides, the majority calling for the defense of the Republic against Francisco Franco and his Nazi-fascist backers. As the war effort increased, the creative world submerged itself in an extraordinary attempt to mobilize public opinion. Writers called for an international congress in Valencia, Pablo Picasso painted “Guernica” to show to the world the atrocities of the civil war, and Joan Miró and others put their talents into creating posters and a variety of artistic objects for international audiences. Picasso’s “Guernica,” created in response to the Condor Legion’s destruction of the ancient Basque capital of Gernika, remains an iconic image of the horrors of war, and has been reproduced countless times, including on many murals. While art did not stop the war or save the Republic, the efforts of the artists drew the attention of the world to the events in Spain. Some of those artists, such as Đorđe Andrejević Kun from Belgrade, returned from the Spanish conflict with dramatic woodcuts that were published by the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, and continued to fight against fascism as a member of the Partisan movement. 

When Yugoslavia’s economic and political crises in the 1980s began to threaten the stability and very existence of the state, street art was an unknown artistic form, although the country was full of socialist modernist monuments and memorials dedicated to the revolutionary Partisan struggle in the Second World War. Diego Rivera’s powerful revolutionary murals in Mexico were no doubt known to Yugoslav cultural figures, but only rarely did art resembling murals play a role in memory politics (Edo Murtić’s mosaics are probably the closest to Rivera’s murals). By the mid-1980s, however, graffiti writers using the New York City style emerged in Split. One journalist ended his article about the appearance of spray painted letters on city walls with the optimistic sign off, “therefore – a big welcome to graffiti.”⁷ This brief optimism was in contrast to newspaper stories about high school latrinalia (bathroom graffiti) in Dalmatia, which were deemed to be “inappropriate”,⁸ followed shortly thereafter by an explosion of dense football fan graffiti covering “every square centimeter” of Poljud Stadium.⁹ Although there were reports of politically problematic messages in the graffiti of the 1980s, it was only on the eve of war that the press started reporting the increasing presence of nationalistic and chauvinistic graffiti by both Serbs and Croats in Croatia. As Yugoslavia hurtled towards war, people’s frustration, anger and fear boiled over into public space, and graffiti became not just a measure of social tensions but a weapon that would be instrumentalized in the ethno-nationalist conflict to come.

            The pre-war graffiti served to mobilize various political groups, instill fear into ethnic minorities, and demarcate territory. Sprayed symbols that were previously used by football ultras to designate their turf became indicators of real borders and frontlines. After the conflict first erupted in Slovenia and Croatia, and later spread to Bosnia and Herzegovina, graffiti accompanied soldiers as they squatted in foxholes, ethnically cleansed villages, defaced monuments, and occupied enemy territory. Terrified villagers wrote “don’t burn” on their houses as attackers (or liberators) drew near, while bored peacekeepers doodled offensive comments about the civilians they were sent to protect. Graffiti in Sarajevo warned citizens of sniper nests and landmines. The post-war landscape of Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina remains littered with the crumbling and heavily graffitied ruins of family homes, formerly thriving factories, and once magnificent monuments. Many of these ruins now function as palimpsests,¹⁰ hosting new layers of political graffiti and contemporary murals over the wartime scars. The pioneering work by Mitja Velikonja on graffiti in the Balkans and Central Europe has shed light on the multiple actors involved in the production, consumption, replication, and removal of urban scribblings, and serves as a foundation for understanding the role of mnemonic murals in the region.¹¹

Once the war ended in Slovenia (1991), Croatia (1991-1995), and Bosnia and Herzegovina (1992-1995), the memory work began. Thirty years after the wars destroyed Yugoslavia, the region is entrenched in what Aleida Assmann refers to as “political memory”,¹² the phase where the narratives have become institutionalized and embedded in society – a memoryscape with new monuments, museums, public spaces, and commemorative practices. The routinization of remembrance practices, and the unimaginative aesthetics of the post-socialist monumental forms has clearly provoked a new chapter in memory politics, this time in the dynamic language of mnemonic murals. While the slow processes in obtaining permission, funding, and space for a classical monument are pursued by veteran organizations and local administrations, the street art format allows for more vibrant memorialization by a younger generation, often members of football ultras who already engage in vandalism, tagging, and the occasional football mural. As the format has spread throughout the region, no longer are amateur artists involved in depicting scenes from the 1990s war, but professional artists and academically trained painters are hired to create increasingly powerful and sophisticated mnemonic murals.

While the former Yugoslavia is experiencing a new mural memory boom, graffiti writers and street artists have been mobilized in the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine. Armed with powerful weapons of social media and mural-making technology, such as drones and robots that can create giant art interventions on the sides of skyscrapers, street artists around the world have created visual appeals for supporting Ukraine. These murals have of course appeared throughout Ukraine itself, but in this essay the focus will be more on the internationalization of murals (and political graffiti to a lesser extent). While we might see mnemonic murals (of fallen soldiers, heroic defenders, and brave civilians) as merely a small element of generating support for Ukraine, famous street artist Banky’s murals painted in November 2022 drew considerable attention to the conflict, and served as an inspiration for artists across the world. 

Case Studies (visual essay)

This preliminary research is based on fieldwork as part of the project “Mnemonic Aesthetics and Strategies in Popular Culture (MEMPOP),” and does not represent a systematic analysis of the full scope of global responses to the full-scale aggression on Ukraine. Mitja Velikonja, one of the Slovenian members of the research team, has carried out fieldwork in Georgia and Ukraine, while the rest of the images (except where noted) are my own. When observing and collecting political graffiti, mnemonic murals, and other examples of street art, the researchers in MEMPOP have focused on four aspects of the visual object:

• Author (since graffiti tends to be illegal, the authorship of the more subversive messages are impossible to determine, while commissioned murals are almost always signed and include instagram tags, QR codes, and even funding details)
• Context/location (the location can determine the visibility of the message, its dissemination on social media, and relationship to other objects or sites of memory, while the context is made clearer if the timing of the street art is known)
• Graffiti/image/text (a discursive analysis of the messages and symbols present on a specific graffito, as well as various layers and interventions that occurred before and after it was created, such as crossout wars)
• Reception (perhaps the most difficult element to study, but can be researched through participant observation, focus groups/opinion polls, and digital humanities tools)

A more thorough research agenda for the future would include a greater emphasis on the reception aspect, such as a survey of online media sources that report on mural production (and reader comments), data related to the sharing and re-posting of articles related to Ukrainian murals, and the cultural policies behind these murals (Ukrainian state and embassy funding, independent organizations, local administrative permissions to create political murals, etc.), but at this stage it is more of a visual overview of a few case studies.

Paris

France has a vibrant street art scene, so these images from March 2022 are certainly only a tiny example of what has been painted and pasted since the full-scale invasion began. But the versatility of graffiti and street art was on display because of the speed in which the walls of Paris were covered in pro-Ukrainian messages and images. Graffiti and street art are ephemeral phenomena that can last only a few hours, or can be preserved for centuries (such as the political slogans found on the walls of Pompeii). A political cause can be thrust into public space overnight, but these messages are also vulnerable to the elements, other graffiti writers (see Belgrade), or proactive communal workers (especially against political graffiti critical of the state).

Warsaw and Poland

Croatia

Although the Croatian government and Prime Minister Andrej Plenković have been stalwart supporters of Ukraine (for example, offering advice on how to retake territory in the same manner as Croatia did in 1995), public expressions of solidarity have been lackluster in comparison to many other EU countries. President Zoran Milanović, a bitter rival of the prime minister and his government, has been more critical of EU support for Ukraine, resulting in accusations that he is Putin’s puppet. Thus, a number of the political graffiti tend to reflect internal Croatian struggles more than a position on the war itself. The Croatian public’s skepticism of EU policy towards Ukraine is counterbalanced by mistrust of Putin due to Russia’s traditional ties to Serbia. At the time of this writing, I am not aware of any large pro-Ukranian murals in Croatia, although a new Homeland War mural is created almost on a weekly basis. These mnemonic murals can be found in every part of the country and prominently feature fallen soldiers, heroic commanders, and scenes from key battles of Croatia’s War of Independence (or Homeland War, Domovinski rat). Some controversial murals have included convicted war criminals, fascist symbols no longer permitted on official monuments, or graphically depicting atrocities committed by the Serb side.¹³

Serbia

Serbia’s strategy over the past decade under the leadership of Aleksandar Vučić has been to walk a fine line between appeasing the European Union (the country’s largest trading partner and source of financial aid) and maintaining strong relations with Russia, a traditional ally. The muralization of conflict has been prolific on Belgrade’s streets (the site of my fieldwork), although there are probably similar examples in Serbia’s other cities. References to Kosovo have covered public spaces for decades, and the most recent controversies include a large mural of Ratko Mladić (convicted by the ICTY for genocide in Srebrenica) that is tacitly approved by the government, thousands of other graffiti, stencils, and stickers celebrating war criminals from the Second World War as well as the 1990s, and countless examples of hate speech directed at Albanians, Bosniaks, and Croats. Serbia’s political balancing act regarding the Russian invasion has been reflected by a graffiti and mnemonic war on the streets of Belgrade, which has also been flooded by Russians and Ukrainians fleeing the war.

Georgia

(Photos by Mitja Velikonja)

The brief conflict between Russia and Georgia over Southern Ossetia in 2008 unsurprisingly made relations between the two countries even worse, and signaled Putin’s resolve to prevent any more former Soviet republics from entering NATO. After the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Georgian support for that country blossomed even more, as well as visible support for NATO, the EU, and the United States. These images are from Mitja Velikonja, and part of a future MEMPOP collaborative article about mnemonic murals from the East to the West.

Conclusion

This preliminary examination of political murals and mnemonic murals in the global debate about Russian aggression in Ukraine merely scratches the surface of a much larger corpus of material. Further research needs to be taken to data mine internet sites, and explore individual artists and organizations promoting Ukrainian street art production. The MEMPOP research team is part of a larger consortium studying graffiti and street art (GRAFSTART), which has only recently been launched and seeks to bring academics from various backgrounds (urban planning, geography, cultural studies, history, memory studies) to tackle the socio-economic as well as political impact of street art. Whereas the geographers approach the muralization of urban space as a process of commodification and gentrification, the memory studies scholars on our team focus more on how mnemonic agents use the media of street art to create dynamic memory sites with potential greater impact than traditional monuments and memorial museums, especially among younger generations. Further research could also explore the mural and political graffiti production in pro-Russian countries, although presumably the more authoritarian the government is, the less they will support any kind of street art, even murals which are pro-government since there is a danger that one day those street skills will be turned against the regime. Nevertheless, there is certainly a corpus of pro-Russian murals in countries beyond Serbia. Research into the reception of these murals is also an important next step, although as mentioned earlier, is quite hard to conduct. Digital humanities tools and analysis of internet traffic and comments can provide at least a general sense of reactions, although for this to make sense it must be focused on specific countries. Finally, I intend to look more closely at Ukrainian murals in the United States during fieldwork in 2024, including in Los Angeles. Since the US is also a part of the street art boom, which includes a proliferation of mnemonic murals (community leaders, George Floyd, indigenous rights in states such as Arizona and California, Black Lives Matter, etc.), it will be useful to see how visible support for Ukraine is in this much bigger memoryscape.

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1. The research for this article was made possible by funding from the HRZZ-ARIS project “Mnemonic Aesthetics and Strategies in Popular Culture: Murals, Film, and Popular Music as Memory Work” (MEMPOP), Project #IPS-2023-02-5149. The initial version was presented at the Domestic Politics of Support for Ukraine in Europe Workshop held at Scripps College, 23 February 2024. All photographs are by Vjeran Pavlaković unless otherwise noted. ↩︎
2. See Jeffrey Ian Ross, ed., Routledge Handbook of Graffiti and Street Art. London: Routledge, 2016; Simon Armstrong, Street Art. London: Thames & Hudson, 2019; and Cedar Lewisohn, Street Art: The Graffiti Revolution. New York: Abrams, 2008. ↩︎
3. For example, Street Art and Urban Creativity, The Journal of Visual Culture, and Visual Studies. ↩︎
4. John Lennon, Conflict Graffiti: From Revolution to Gentrification. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021. ↩︎
5. Interview with Joe Pagac, Tucson, Arizona, 6 January 2024. ↩︎
6. Jay Winter, “Sites of Memory,” in Susannah Radstone and Bill Schwarz, eds. Memory: Histories, Theories, Debates. New York: Fordham University Press, 2010, p. 315. ↩︎
7. Z. Gall, “Splitski grafiti”, Slobodna Dalmacija, 28 October 1985, p. 7. ↩︎
8. Stanko Bašić, “Budimo nemogući, tražimo realno!” Slobodna Dalmacija, 26 June 1988, p. 18. ↩︎
9. Zoran Krželj, “Ne vidi se, upaljen je mrak”, Slobodna Dalmacija, 13 December 1986, p. 15. ↩︎
10. Mari Myllylä, “Graffiti as a Palimpsest”, Street Art and Urban Creativity, vol. 4, no. 2 (2018), pp. 25-35. ↩︎
11. Mitja Velikonja, Post-socialist Political Graffiti in the Balkans and Central Europe. London: Routledge, 2019. ↩︎
12. Aleida Assman, “Four Formats of Memory: From Individual to Collective Constructions of the Past,” Christian Emden and David Midgley, eds. Cultural Memory and Historical Consciousness in the German-Speaking World since 1500. Bern: Peter Lang, 2004.  ↩︎
13. Vjeran Pavlaković, Memoryscapes of the Homeland War. Zagreb: YIHR, 2022, p. 14. ↩︎