Artists are using their art to make statements and raise funds as Russia's brutal attack on Ukraine intensifies.

“There is no place for art when civilians are dying under the fire of missiles, when citizens of Ukraine are hiding in shelters, when Russian protesters are getting silenced,” wrote artists Alexandra Sukhareva and Kirill Savchenkov with curator Raimundas Malašauskasm in their announcement that the Russian pavilion will be withdrawn from the upcoming Venice Biennale opening in April. While both Russia and Ukraine will be absent from the 2022 Biennale, the world's premier contemporary art display will go on. The Biennale released a statement, noting that "for those who oppose the current regime in Russia there will always be a place in the exhibitions of La Biennale."

An NFT sale featuring a digital flag of Ukraine brought $6.7 million for the country's defenses this week. Organized by UkraineDAO, an initiative backed by Nadya Tolokonnikova, a member of the anti-Putin Russian activist group and feminist punk band Pussy Riot, the sale came after Ukraine appealed for cryptocurrency donations. (CNN cites blockchain analytics firm Elliptic as tracking over 72,000 transactions worth around $47 million to Ukraine's government and NGOs as of Wednesday.)

An artist with New York's Heller Gallery, Carmen Spera created a series (2011-2015) of antiwar sculptures entitled Guns & Roses, constructed-glass machine guns filled with flowers—not bullets.  The series nearly sold out in exhibitions in the US and China, but Spera kept several "irresistible peace guns" for himself, notes the gallery. Now, moved by the plight of Ukraine’s children, the artist is offering his Ghost Gun sculpture for sale and pledging all of the proceeds to the Save the Children Foundation’s Ukraine effort.

Russian-born artist Olive Allen, a pioneer of NFT art, took a fiery stand in front of the Russian consulate in New York stating, “Burning my passport is an act of coming out and being open about my national identity despite the fears of being silenced as the unpopular Russian voice and face the consequence of being forever denied entry to Russia and being discriminated against in the Western world.” An auction of her Burnt Passport NFT will be held on SuperRare this Friday, March 4th with 100% of the proceeds going to humanitarian organizations in Ukraine.

Arts organizers and independent curators Barbara Pollack and Anne Verhallen, who founded Art in a Time Like This in March 2020, note that Ukrainian artists and curators—even those among the 1,000,000 refugees—are finding ways to express themselves despite severe dangers.

“I was afraid of staying, I was afraid of leaving; neither is safe. I decided to stay,” said Ukrainian-based artist Sana Shahmuradova to Art at a Time Like This, which is offering its social media accounts as a platform for artists opposing Putin’s actions.

Art at a Time Like This curators say they are aware that a consequence of this war will be a new rise of artists as refugees, much like the artists from Afghanistan featured in their current exhibition, Before Silence: Afghan Artists in Exile. A particularly poignant moment in that show includes the end of a poem by photographer Morteza Herati:

On August 15, 2021, all the dreams turned into nightmares.
And they fell down.
We fell down
Human beings fell down…