Where the Sun Weeps: the Art of Sana Shahmuradova Tanksa (2025)

Sana Shahmuradova Tanksa’s artworks are the embodiment of movement, frozen in paint. Figures twist and dance within flushes of eerie glowing blue stars – reminiscent of surrealist painters such as Salvador Dali, their landscapes melting away into the canvas with carefully detailed faces which look out to the audience from their own crumbling of humanity. Tanksa’s poetic artworks use aspects of Ukrainian history and folklore to piece together a deeper exploration of intergenerational trauma, one that continues to disrupt her and fellow Ukrainians.

Born in Odesa and having spent much of her childhood in the village of Podillia, Shahmuradova Tanksa and her family emigrated to Toronto, Canada in 2013, where she completed a Bachelors of Arts in Psychology. She describes this move as a “traumatic immigration experience,” happening just before the Euromaidan protests of early 2014. “I feel terrible because I really felt I needed to be back [in Ukraine], I got very depressed. I just started drawing, drawing all the time,” the artist recalls. In 2020, Shahmuradova Tanksa decided to move to Kyiv, where she has set up her studio and has continued painting throughout air raids and black outs.

After showing all around Europe and Ukraine, 2024 marked Shahmuradova Tanksa’s inclusion in the Sydney Biennale, sharing her documents of war with the Australian public. Her installation at the Artspace Gallery in Woolloomooloo, Sydney, titled “Those who survived the apocalypse/The inhabitants of the Tethys,” explores the Black Sea as a site of both connection and destruction. The show featured various unstretched canvases, the edges left unprimed and fraying – as well as watercolor and paper works hidden away in glass cabinets around the space. The main correlation between this large body of work are the undulating shapes and forms which bubble away at the paint’s surface. The colors dulled in many of these pieces, with specs of light or hope dotting each work. These paintings stand as testament to a people whose culture and identity has been repeatedly pummeled, invaded and erased. It is a diary of the artist – moving and working around Ukraine.

During the first spring months after the invasion, Shahmuradova Tanksa painted “Tired Sun, Delayed Sowing, Faithful Sheep,” 2022, depicting a sheep alongside an abstracted human figure sowing seeds beneath a weeping sun, with a cross in the background. The work is almost monotone, with slight shifts in the sickly green-yellow creating smoke-like forms. The imagery blends Christian iconography with mystical symbolism, evoking the dreamlike visions of William Blake and Marc Chagall. The sheep, which butts the hand, can come to symbolize a resistance to normality, whether it be seen in the resistance of the Ukrainian people or something much darker.

“That spring, the sowing of the fields was disrupted by shelling, and we lost so much grain,” Shahmuradova Tanksa reflects. “The sun feels like a god – it represents something good, but it’s powerless to stop what’s happening.”

Tired Sun, Delayed Sowing, Faithful Sheep, 2022. Courtesy of the artist and Gunia Nowik Gallery

Some of the most visually striking works from this series were created on her return to Kyiv, as she processed the trauma of the invasion, giving rise to the idea that art can be a political act in itself. Shahmuradova Tanksa reflects that her artmaking has developed into “one of the most honest ways to communicate what’s happening in Ukraine.”

The work, “Apocalypse Survivors #6,” 2023 is a cacophonous sea of faces and bodies, winged creatures and ghostly specters. In the center of this large canvas piece is a bright white figure, its arms are wings poised to escape the chaotic scene, reaching and wrapping around the darkness. In between the glowing humanoid figures are flashes of dark earthy tones, obscuring the surroundings, ochre swirls and mixes into bright navy blues, darkening it to a muddy soiled color. The faces look on, differentiating themselves from the thin emancipated bodies, they seem unbothered, ignoring the scene and highlighting many parallels with the Western focus on Ukraine. Shahmuradova Tanksa uses an interesting technique in the top of the piece, her brushstrokes are clearly visible as the lines fly off the canvas like a halo surrounding the scene.

Sana Shahmuradova Tanksa, (Left to Right) Apocalypse Survivors #1, Apocalypse Survivors Fish, Apocalypse Survivors #6, 2023. Courtesy of the artist and Gunia Nowik Gallery

Similarly, the bright pink and red hues of “Bosom of the Land,” 2023, creates a haunting depiction of a limp woman and a smoking heart. The colors become violent as the female figure slumps down, her dark hair the only distinction from the pink cloud. Opposite her is a hand with a weeping eye on it, squeezing a heart as it omits smoke, filling the canvas. The piece has an oppressive quality, in which you can almost feel the hot pink smoke entering your lungs – it’s a reflection on the connections and dissociations of being a woman during war. She is the bosom of the land, its life-giver.

Sana Shahmuradova Tanksa, Bosom of the Land, 2023. Courtesy of the artist and Gunia Nowik Gallery

In Shahmuradova Tanksa’s work, we find more than just visual expression – we witness a form of resistance, a way of bearing witness, and a deeply personal processing of collective grief. Her paintings do not seek to resolve the chaos, but rather to hold space for it: to honor the resilience of the Ukrainian spirit while tracing the lines of its scars. Rooted in history, mythology, and personal memory, her canvases become living documents – alive with motion, emotion, and the unspoken.

In 2022, one of her artworks appeared in a pro-Ukraine music video by Pink Floyd. As her international presence has grown through residencies and exhibitions, she continues to use her platform to amplify the realities of her homeland. Through her luminous, haunted figures and fragmented, dreamlike scenes, Shahmuradova Tanksa invites us not only to see but to feel the complexity of a homeland under siege. Her art is not just about survival – it is a reminder that culture, even when threatened, continues to breathe, to resist, and to dance.