FRONTIER DISCOURSE IN THE CONTEMPORARY PAINTING BY ARTISTS FROM THE DANUBE REGION OF UKRAINE

Definitions. The concept of the frontier reflects a space with movable boundaries; a contact zone of interaction that, under certain conditions, leads to the integration of the Self and the Other. “Frontier Discourse” is presented as a model for studying the culture of ethnic communities located within the geopolitical influence of various powers. The name of the region is a component of frontier discourse. In both contemporary academic and widespread usage, the multiple names of the region coexist:

• Southern Odesa Oblast (administrative);

• Ukrainian Danube Region; The Dniester and Danube interfluve (geographical);

• Southern Bessarabia (Moldovan, Romanian);

• Budzhak (Turkish).

The region's ancient history is a kaleidoscope of different states: Scythians, Greeks, Dacians, Romans, Visigoths, Proto-Bulgarians, the Moldova principality, the Golden Horde, and the Ottoman Empire. The region's modern history starts after the deportation of the Nogai Tatars and the arrival of colonists to settle and develop the region: Old Believers, Germans, Bulgarians, Gagauzes, Greeks, Russians, Ukrainians, and others. The paintings of South-Bessarabian artists are a vivid example of local art and a separate trend in the Ukrainian school of painting. It was formed under the influence of the Moldovan, southern Ukrainian, and Bulgarian schools of easel painting. 

In Alexander Kara’s painting The Colonists (2002), the life drama of the first migrants who set out into the unknown is encoded. The family on the cart is a generalized image of a community embarking into the unknown, accompanied by an angel as a spiritual guide. The compositional division of the painting into two color layers – dark blue (the past) and light blue (the future) – serves as a marker of transition from one state of being to another. The double arch, where one leads to emptiness and the other to a home and cultivated space, embodies the dilemma of choice and, simultaneously, a deep faith in providence and the future.