From war refugee to UvA scholar: “Research is my coping strategy”
Three and a half years ago, film scholar Lesia Kulchynska (41) was forced to leave her home in Kyiv when war broke out with Russia. After months of displacement across half of Europe, she now holds a temporary position at the University of Amsterdam, where she studies the visual dimensions of war and violence.
It is five o’clock in the morning on 24 February 2022 when Kulchynska is jolted awake by the first explosion. Still half asleep, she tries to convince herself it must be nothing, but as more blasts follow, she quickly grabs her phone. She checks the news. Calls friends. But for a long while, information is scarce. Some friends have heard the explosions, others have not. Confusion and unease reign. “When the news finally reached me that the war had begun, I knew we had to leave immediately.”
That night, she and her husband wait for their daughter to wake up before deciding to flee. “We took as little as possible so we wouldn’t be weighed down. We had no car, so we carried just a small suitcase with a few documents, some food from the freezer, and our daughter’s Frozen dress. We had no plan at all, just the knowledge that we had to go.” For a moment, she even considers walking the long distance to the border, but by chance the bus to a village near the Romanian border is still running. Twenty-four hours after the first explosion, the family arrives in Bucharest.
Curator
“Of course, I remember that time vividly,” she says, speaking calmly from her office in the P.C. Hoofthuis. “In the days before the Russian invasion, there was something in the air, a tension you could feel. Russian tanks had been seen at the border, but still many people believed nothing would happen.”
At the time, Kulchynska was working as a curator at the Pinchuk Art Centre in Kyiv, alongside her role as a researcher at a Ukrainian academic institute. “We had a Belgian head curator who left for Belgium a few days before the invasion. That was clearly a bad sign. Our government kept telling us there was no danger, but the Belgians obviously saw it differently.”
Bucharest
Once in Bucharest, Kulchynska feels like her career as an art historian and film scholar – the area in which she earned her PhD in 2011 – might be over. “We had no idea what the future would bring. When we left home, I had prepared myself for the worst. I went into a kind of tunnel vision, unable to look ahead. We were in a vacuum. Everything we had was left behind.” Romania ended up never feeling quite safe. “I kept fearing the war would spread there too. At night, we would wake up to the sound of trams passing by, so loud that we thought we were hearing explosions.”
Still, she decided to start working again. “At first, everything I did felt irrelevant, even though I managed to find work as a curator in Bucharest. Writing, working, even talking seemed meaningless in wartime. The words I had no longer seemed to be relevant. But keeping busy with various projects really helped me out.”
Research
Eventually, Kulchynska found her way back to academic research. After periods in Finland and Italy – where she was temporarily affiliated with the Bibliotheca Hertziana, a renowned art history institute in Rome – she arrived in Amsterdam in September 2024. The Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (NIAS) offered her a place through its Safe Haven Fellowship, which supports displaced international scholars.
There, she spent six months working on her ongoing research into the production and consumption of images of the Russo-Ukrainian war. In April 2025, she was offered a temporary postdoctoral position at the UvA. “The position was initially for six months but has since been extended once. The temporary nature of these contracts puts you in a strange mindset. Nothing feels entirely real. You’re in a safe environment for now, but it’s temporary, and you don’t know what comes next.”
Processing
To counter that sense of impermanence, the Ukrainian researcher has made one overarching project the stable core of her professional life. “Wherever I go, I continue my research on the visuality of violence.” Even before the war, she was fascinated by the powerful emotional reactions that images can provoke. “Certain images can trigger deep feelings of threat and helplessness. In Ukraine, one of my exhibitions was even censored for that reason. I want to understand where that intensity comes from.”
“During my time in Rome, I realised that I had become the one being affected by violent imagery, by the images of the war in Ukraine itself,” she explains. “Through my research and the book I’m writing, I want to show how Russia constructs an alternative reality. This war is a battle over the vision of reality, in which both sides try to disseminate their own version of the truth. When they succeed, those fictional images can start to shape the real world, and are translated into a physical reality through violence.”
For Kulchynska, the overlap between her research and her personal life has become a way to process the ongoing trauma of war. “This research is my coping strategy. I may be in a safe country now, but I still see so many images of the war. I’m not there physically, but in another sense, I still am. The flood of fabricated images and news from Russia affects me deeply. Working on my research gives me a way to process it all.”
