Pro-Russian separatists in Donetsk, a city in the eastern Ukraine controlled by the rebel group Donetsk People’s Republic, destroyed a 130-foot-tall sculpture in spectacular fashion earlier this month, International Business Times reports. Video of the explosion surfaced this week, showing a horrifying, Taliban-esque act of terrorism.
The installation was constructed in 2012 by Cameroonian artist Pascale Marthine Tayou as a tribute to the women who helped rebuild the city after the Second World War. Tayou placed a giant tube of lipstick on top of an industrial smokestack. “I am speechless/ I am helpless !/ No space for hate on the ground of my secret garden/ No place for the bad seed in my soul!” Tayou wrote in a poem-statement sent to IBT.
The installation was funded by a Ukranian arts organization called Izolyatsia, which was formerly based at the former insulation factory in Donetsk but was forced to relocate to Kiev after the separatists came to power and began destroying art. Izolyatsia says that “the pro-Russian occupants use the territory and the premises of the foundation as a base for militants training, a prison, an execution place, and a warehouse for stolen cars,” according to the video’s caption.
