Baby Hipsters in Little Berlin
A snapshot of Kyiv before the full-scale invasion
When my family and I lived in Kyiv in 2019, it was the model iteration of the kind of post-Communist capital that would get called “little Berlin”: a familiar combination of old, decrepit, and inexpensive housing and new, (relatively) expensive cafes and restaurants which was beginning to draw an equally familiar combination of cosmopolitan art world types and young bohemians pairing artless enthusiasm with savvy self-branding (and supportive parents).
Avatars of the latter were (and are) a pair of twin sister street artists whose murals around the trendy Podil neighborhood stood out for their splashy color and ubiquity. I wrote a piece about them which didn’t find a home at the time but share here.
March 2019
In mid-winter Kyiv, the snow collects unplowed, too dry to melt or turn into slush, trampled hard and white in parks and sidewalks, tan and yielding as beach sand in the street. Eventually, somehow, it disperses, ploughed and harrowed by trams and minibuses, carried away particle by particle by boot heels and bald, spinning wheels—or simply flattened, ground smaller and smaller until it disappears. The inside edges of sidewalks are roped off with striped caution tape weighted in place with water jugs, warning against sliding ice and snow melting off the corrugated roof. Commuters in upholstered coats sip their morning coffee with plastic straws stuck through lids’ sip holes. An old lady in a headscarf sells loose cigarettes off a milk crate. Transient tents advertise one or another of the dozens of uninspiring candidates for the upcoming presidential contest, in which a plurality of voters appear willing to elect a television comedian (“They’re all terrible; at least he’s funny,” said a friend). The brakes of the trolley bellow a ragged reveille in the dark.
Kyiv is historically monumental, spotted with brick buildings in various states of abandonment or renovation, with the sleazy gilt anti-glamour of adjacent wealth, power, and corruption, and a burgeoning hipster bubble. The waterfront, downhill neighborhood of Podil is one of the city’s oldest, and a précis for the rest: centered on a bustling pedestrian strip by a university, where a newly installed Ferris wheel overlooks the husk of a 19th-century arcade mall in legal and political limbo, where global cuisine and spectacular attempts at gaudy development coexist with blocks of muted apartment buildings punctuated by delis, blue-collar storefronts (tool and shoe repair, auto parts), and the kind of well-heated and low-lit cafes haunted by the young, bearded, and furtively ambitious.
Podil is also a neighborhood of murals—and, like Kyiv more generally, has become a locus for the practice elevated as “street art”: quick old-school tags (internationals like BNE and FKS; someone repping “WEEN” or a pair of X-ed out sixteenth notes), miniatures (mosaics of characters from Star Wars and Futurama, a shin-level carved rose in a concrete nest).
More dramatically, building-high murals which often highlight patriotic or nationalistic imagery: On Voloska, a mustachioed man in a traditional embroidered blouse fords a swollen river with his arm over a swimming elk. On Spasska, a five-story Cossack submits to tribal makeup (the mural is by a Brazilian artist) painted by disembodied hands. Near the Tarasa Shevchenka metro stop, an idealized vision of a Ukrainian family strike pious poses amidst flowers and fluttering doves. .
The most vibrant and memorable Kyiv street art, though, is the work of a pair of 22-year- old twins who call themselves Sestry Feldman—the Feldman Sisters. Neither miniaturists nor, so far, creators of tenement-size statements, the Sestry incline towards conservatively enclosed rectangular frames around “mini-murals” that max out at about eight feet square—just less than the armspans of two young women working quickly and in tandem. The Feldmans eschew the wide monochrome canvasses—the waterfront highway, the decrepit office buildings—preferred by more traditional taggers for the tiles, brick, and plaster of central Podil. In a city whose grays and pastels are punctuated mostly by gold church domes, the Feldmans favor the bright primary colors otherwise seen only in playgrounds (or in a museum, in the fantastical beasts of the folk painter Maria Priymachenko). Their vignettes include fantasias of ecological disaster (bisected sharks and dinosaurs, volcanos, bubbling and frying Earths cooked and eaten by unseen giants), Japanese kitsch (samurai, kimonos, koi), and apocalyptic riffs on Tarot cards. And, as a more or less conscious act of branding, they sign each “canvas” in large capital Latin letters, making the words SESTRY FELDMAN a ubiqitous street-level refrain.
Nicol and Mishel Feldman moved to Kyiv four years ago from Dnipro (formerly Dnipropetrovsk), once a Soviet industrial center for military equipment, from which foreigners were excluded—“boring,” says Mishel, “a town-monster.” (We spoke in English, in which they are conversant but not fluent.) Their parents are prosperous and contrarian: their father, they say vaguely, was a “creator of [a] bank...and then he had some problems with politics and other stuff, and then he decided it’s not interesting to have deals with money.” (He now develops mobile homes that unfold from the shape and size of a standard shipping container.) The sisters, the middle children of six, were homeschooled by tutors, their subjects “not the things that people usually study at school; like, it was a lot of sports, music, and painting and philosophy, psychology.” They were encouraged by their parents—who had themselves avoided school—to explore the family’s extensive library. An encounter with the symbolic, satirical work of Hieronymous Bosch was formative (they also cite cyberpunk movies like Ghost in the Shell and The Matrix, animation like Rick and Morty and The Simpsons, the mystical surrealistic films of Alejandro Jodorowsky, and Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s Home). “When I was five years old,” says Mishel, “I saw a big book with his ‘[Paradise] and Hell,’ and it was the most impressive for starting to draw in my life, that book. Sometimes I come back to [look at] his art to remember what I feel when I was a child.”
A younger brother introduced them to skateboarding, and they found the sense of community exhilarating—and a continuing reference point for their ambitions as members of, or catalyst for, a similar community of artists. Skateboarding “[gave] us more freedom in our mind. After that, it was easier to connect with other people in different spheres...Artists are not so connectible with each other. Artists have their own space, their own minds.” Skateboarding events also brought them for the first time upstream to Kyiv, where, at eighteen, they moved.
Since the hostel in which they first lived wasn’t conducive to oil-and-canvas painting, they considered, for the first time, the dirty walls of the city. While Kyiv retains the legacy of several waves of monumental construction, from the downtown’s decorative imperial facades to the utilitarian Soviet commuter neighborhoods to today’s Trumpian luxury highrises, abandoned and collapsing buildings are a regular feature. The 19th-century architecture, in particular, has been a casualty of low or non-existent property tax. This encourages the developers who own (often through opaque shell companies) the land on which the buildings stand, instead of undertaking the costly process of restoration under landmark laws, to simply wait for them to collapse—or “collapse”—so they can be replaced with cheaper modern construction.
On the domestic level, as well, there is a stark distinction in Kyiv, and the post-Soviet urban world in general, between public and private spaces. The breakdown of the division between public and private was, of course, a primary concern of Soviet thinking, mainly through the elimination of the latter, and the re-erection of the barrier was haphazard both physically and psychologically. One byproduct of the hurried privatization of apartment buildings in the post- Soviet era is the contrast between the unmaintained public space—the dank, urine-smelling concrete entryways and staircases, the rattletrap elevators, the twisted mailboxes, the stained and unstable facades—and the warm, meticulous domesticity of individual apartments.
The collapse of responsibility for the commons, though, creates an opportunity for freelance aesthetes like the muralists. We curate the objects that surround us in our private living spaces, the Feldmans told the online magazine BZH: “In our house, there is a chair of a certain shape; the wall is painted in some color...But you live not only in your apartment, but also in the city. If you walk down the street and see an ugly wall that annoys you, you redo it. If something is already hung without your permission, then you can do something without permission.” This casual assertion of ownership, the youthful confidence that it’s easier to beg forgiveness than ask permission, blithely takes advantage of a general passive abdication of accountability for public aesthetics. But the re-framing of individual impulse and interest as general good is also an invitation to an almost Soviet conception of a public space “owned” communally, not by a state, but by a collection of individuals—any of whom can choose to embellish it as they see fit. When the sisters talk about street art, they frame it as a collaboration—“We try to connect the picture with the place where we make it, [and] we will not draw on a wall which we think is good.” If locals “react negatively,” they told Bit.UA, “we ask what pictures they would like to see on this street.” (Though “while they are talking, we finish the job and run away.”)
Sometimes, residents and authorities quietly support their efforts. The Feldmans take pride in stories of residents who discover them at their nocturnal work, ask a few questions, and then leave them to finish; or sympathetic police: one cop asks if the paint is acrylic and gives them ten minutes to finish; another asks to see a sketch, says they can’t detain the girls since they don’t have women in the patrol, and leaves, saying “We never saw each other.” “In Kyiv, maybe, the police [are] not so radical, like in Europe, or like in Germany,” says Mishel. “Here, it’s people, and you can talk to them, and they will get it, and they will laugh.” Some local cops are even fans of the work. The sisters admit that they accrue a benefit from presenting as small, unthreatening young women: “We look maybe like children, not like vandals.”
The Feldmans, while not technically identical, are similar enough that local Russian- language interviews quote them in the plural. They share straight, shoulder-length black hair and striking dark eyebrows, and have a subtle collection of small tattoos on their hands. They dress in androgynously baggy comfort: patched hoodie, wool cap, plaid overshirt. Mishel is more voluble, or more confident in her English; Nicol’s affect is ironic and reserved. They don’t, they say, always work together on more traditional on-canvas painting, but their street-art projects are improvisational and collaborative: “When we draw street art, we don’t talk to each other, because we feel very good what we want to do together...No-one is boss. We never know when it will be finished; we never know what it will be like in the end.” They began co-signing their street art early in their time in Kyiv, in a move which they frame as a way of forming a community in a new city, but which was inextricable from an instinct for self-promotion. Their street art didn’t begin as an advertisement for their brand, says Nicol, but “we made a website with our pictures and called it ‘Sestry Feldman,’ and then we [thought], why didn’t we autograph like this to have connect with other artists and people on the street who can see and ask you what they think about your art.” “It’s like dialogue,” adds Nicole. (For a time, they tagged their public work “Sestry_Feldman,” the address of their active Instagram account.)
Like any good contemporary artists, the sisters are sensitive enough to the nuance of aesthetic and merchandising concerns that their work can be easily separated into three distinct tracks of street, commercial, and gallery work. The vibrant and eye-catching street art is clarified and commodified (for the “commercial stuff, we just try to make something interesting and useful for people”) in their online store on bags, jackets, furniture, socks, skateboard decks, coconut water, even cookies. Sestry Feldman shows in a variety of small galleries and multi-use art spaces have included experiments with elements of performance, mostly live improvisational painting. In their recent “Suspense,” the Feldmans, dressed as the twins from The Shining, spent an hour on and (mostly) off stage next to a white grand piano at a jazz and blues club, painting a table setting black (with a break for a short game of tic-tac-toe and cigarettes in the parking lot) to the accompaniment of Bernard Herrmann film scores from Vertigo and Psycho. The evening perhaps obscured the distinction between suspense and boredom: as the twins disappeared for fifteen or twenty minutes between brief emergences, much of the crowd began to chat and leave. Their parents looked on indulgently from a back table, with a bouquet of lavender roses.
More compelling is their recent series of street art inspired by an encounter in a film with the esoteric abstractions of the newly-trendy Hilma af Klint, the fin-de-siecle Swedish painter whose revival has been accelerated by recent exhibitions in London and the Guggenheim, as well as the Kristen Stewart movie Personal Shopper. Encouraged by af Klint’s example to explore minimalist design and a more pastel palette, the Feldmans created crowds of mouthless pancake faces in lemon, beige, and teal, melting and staring. The muted colors echo the astringent winter cityscape, and the figures’ empty eyes evoke the gaping windowless facades that face off across, for example, Hlybochytska Street: those of abandoned office buildings on one side, the unfinished concrete and rebar frames of gaudy development on the other.
The Feldmans talk with indistinct idealism about “travel[ling] the world...to make a community of different interesting artists, musicians, skateboarders—like synergy.” More concretely, the sisters are rolling out their newest commercial enterprise: CB Post, a weekly events listing of “underground” cultural events printed on labels affixed to bottles of cold brew coffee, and available at a short list of neighborhood bars and coffeeshops.
Down the street from a set of the Feldman’s faces, a building-length tag by an eponymous local graffiti crew reads, in brutal block letters, “Erase The City.”
The Feldman’s project is less nihilistic. Like Prague or Berlin in the 1990s, Kyiv is a cosmopolitan city shaken by political instability, made attractively inexpensive (to foreigners) by the post-revolutionary currency collapse, and liberated by the grant of visa-free travel for Ukrainians to the European Union. It’s an opportunity for an internet-native, culturally omnivorous generation of young and ambitious artists with post-revolutionary expectations, and with the luxury and moxie to make Kyiv their playground. I imagined they’d be older, said a friend when I told them about my interest in the Sestry Feldman. But, the friend said, it made sense that they weren’t: “They are baby hipsters in Little Berlin.”
Band People: Life and Work in Popular Music is out September 10, and I’m told pre-orders have already been released for shipping. Foreword Review said it was “riveting…The book’s research and testimonials reinforce one another to great effect…a deep anthropological study of the internal functions of rock bands.”