“Seventeen years ago – on March 18, 2003 – David Burgess and Will Saunders climbed the sails of the Sydney Opera House and painted in looming red letters the words NO WAR. The pair were sentenced to nine months’ weekend jail and divided the nation between those appalled at the iconoclasm and those who believed the message made the gesture worthy.

A decade after Burgess and Saunders’ defiant act, on the other side of the world, pro-democracy protests began in Maidan Nezalezhnosti, or Independence Square, in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev. The collective weight of the protesters, accumulated over months, caused the Maidan’s granite slabs to crack. The protests turned tragically fatal and marked the beginning of the Ukrainian revolution and the ongoing civil war.

For Ukrainian-born, Melbourne artist Stanislava Pinchuk, 31, these two public spaces, arguably the hearts of their respective nations, span her two citizenships. Pinchuk has brought both sites together in a new photographic work The Red Carpet, which she will unveil in conjunction with a lecture titled The Thread of War at the All About Women festival at the Sydney Opera House on March 8…”

Read my profile of artist Stanislava Pinchuk, published in The Sydney Morning Herald Spectrum, here.