The feminist artist Oksana Shachko, a founding member of the protest group FEMEN, has died at age 31. According to friends, the Ukraine-born activist, who had political asylum in France, left a suicide note in her Paris apartment. Shachko was an artist from a young age. Educated in the Orthodox tradition, she made religious paintings and at the age of 8 her artistic talent earned her a place at a specialized school in Ukraine focused on painting religious icons. By age 10, Shachko was being commissioned to create church frescoes, and moved into the church full time at aged 12. As an adult, her later works subverted traditional religious iconography to create feminist art. As she grew Shachko became disillusioned with religion. She recalled how aged 14, she had rejected her Orthodox education. “I understood that religion is just a fucking business and a tool to manipulate society. That made me very angry and I stopped painting the icons,” she told Crash magazine in November 2017. Following this revelation, Shachko turned towards political activism, first as young Communist who wanted to clean statues of Lenin, she told Crash, and then as a firebrand feminist, eventually founding FEMEN with three others in 2008 in response to the unjust deaths of four women at a hospital in Khmelnitsky. Art remained central to her activism. Similar to the Russian punk protest group Pussy Riot, FEMEN is known for its activist protests disrupting political events, particularly for its topless protests directed at leaders they view as dictators or oppressors. Shachko was responsible for the creative side of FEMEN’s public image, which captured the media’s attention—although at great risk to its members. According to the group, in 2011 she was among three members seized by security officers following a topless protest mocking Belarusian President Alyaksandr Lukashenka. The women were taken to a forest and made to strip naked, their hair was cut off, and they were covered in oil and threatened with being set on fire. In 2013, she was also among those who confronted Vladimir Putin and German chancellor Angela Merkel in Hannover, Germany. Shachko had been exiled in France since 2013, and after a dispute with fellow member Inna Shevchenko, left the movement in 2014 and returned to a career as a full-time artist. She enrolled in Paris’s Beaux-Arts school in 2017. One of her tutors, Olivier Blanckart, told the French newspaper La Croix that she initially saw the FEMEN action as an art performance. “The crown in her hair, painting on a bare bust: Oksana Chatchko invented an aesthetic grammar of activism,” Blankart said. Her recent artwork drew from her experience painting religious icons as well as her time as a political activist. A series, “Iconoclast,” uses the traditional painting methods of Orthodox icons but subverts the traditional imagery by, for example, adding more women, such as four naked brides in place of the Knights of the Apocalypse, depicting saints wielding Kalashnikovs, or the crucifixion as an orgy. #icon #iconoclast #free A post shared by Oxanashachko (@oksanashachko) on Mar 26, 2018 at 10:29am PDT She had her first solo exhibition in France at Galerie Mansart in 2016, exhibiting a series of seven religious “icons” referencing the seven Capital sins. In July 2016, she showed two icons in Espace Usanii in a show titled “Who’s That Girl?” Her latest exhibition was in Paris in June, when she showed some of her icons alongside work by Adel Abdessemed and Joseph Beuys in an exhibition titled “Talking About a Revolution!” at Galerie 22 Visconti, a space dedicated to the May 1968 protest movement. A post on FEMEN’s website on July 23 mourned the the young artist’s death. “RIP. The most fearless and vulnerable Oksana Shachko has left us,” it read. “We mourn together with her relatives and friends.” #sextremism A post shared by Oxanashachko (@oksanashachko) on Mar 13, 2018 at 6:48am PDT French authorities have since confirmed her death but are awaiting the results of an autopsy to confirm the cause. Follow Artnet News on Facebook:<doc-sep>Together with the Pussy Riot punk group in Russia, Femen became part of a post-Soviet protest phenomenon that sometimes drew a violent reaction. In 2011, Femen said that Ms. Shachko and other activists had been abducted in Minsk, the capital of Belarus, after campaigning in front of the K.G.B. headquarters there. Several members were beaten up in Kiev, Ukraine’s capital, in 2013 ahead of a visit by President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. Ms. Shachko and several other activists from the university town of Khmelnytsky, Ukraine, founded Femen in 2008. After a few conventional protests, they decided to demonstrate topless, often with political slogans written on their bodies. At times braving icy temperatures, Femen members protested in Ukraine against sexual exploitation; in Davos, Switzerland — the scene of an annual conference of world political and business leaders — against income inequality; and, in St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican, against policies of the Roman Catholic Church, among other targets. In their nakedness they wore flower crowns to symbolize chastity. In 2013, members of Femen ran topless in front of Mr. Putin as he visited Germany, drawing a grin and two thumbs up from him before guards wrestled the activists to the ground. Ms. Shachko, along with several other Femen members, moved to Paris that same year and was granted political asylum by the French authorities. She maintained that the group’s members had been pursued by Russian special services and that the agents had planted a grenade in Femen’s office in Kiev, along with a photograph of Mr. Putin.<doc-sep>Oksana Shachko (Photo: Getty Images) One of the founders of the international feminist group Femen, Oksana Shachko, was found dead in her Paris apartment on Monday of an apparent suicide. According to a statement from one of her friends, she left a note, and this was her third attempt to commit suicide in the past two years. “May you know her, may you respect her, may you never forget her,” Femen leader Inna Shevchenko said in an email to Yahoo Lifestyle. “Oksana Shachko: one of the most remarkable women of our time. One of the greatest fighters against the unjust world. Who fought hard against injustices of society, who fought hard for not only herself but for all women around the world.” In her short life, Shachko, 31, made a name for herself as an activist and an artist. Along with Alexandra Shevchenko and Anna Gutsol, she first started Femen with a demonstration in their native Ukraine to protest the sexual exploitation of Ukrainian women by foreign men. From then on, their protests often involved the women going topless, with provocative statements emblazoned on their chests. A post shared by Oxanashachko (@oksanashachko) on Oct 11, 2017 at 8:49am PDT “We also used sexuality to prove our points and explained you didn’t have to be ashamed of your body as a woman,” Shachko explained in an interview with the French magazine Crash last year. “Our bodies were our weapons.” Because they went topless and were willing to get arrested at protests, Femen’s members attracted headlines through the years. They protested against everything from sex tourism to limitations on a free press. They rallied against the prosecution of the feminist punk rock group Pussy Riot in Russia in 2012, just one of the occasions that they opposed Vladimir Putin’s regime. They also demonstrated against other leaders, for example former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi (as shown in this video), and Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko. After speaking out against Lukashenko in 2011, Shachko was one of three women who said they were kidnapped by the KGB in Belarus and taken to the woods. There, agents allegedly cut their hair, forced them to strip off their clothes, and doused them with oil, threatening to set them on fire but instead leaving them there. They subsequently managed to make their way to a nearby village to seek help. Story continues According to the Guardian, Shachko was also abducted and beaten in Ukraine during a visit to the country by Putin. “We compare her to Joan of Arc,” Shachko’s mother said in the 2014 documentary I Am Femen. “She’s a real revolutionary, an incredibly strong girl.” But by 2013, Shachko decided to emigrate, seeking refugee status in France. She continued her protests as part of Femen for another year, but in her interview with Crash, she explained why she didn’t believe she was a part of the group anymore. “As an ideology it exists but as a structure it doesn’t exist anymore, because nobody really works on it,” she said. “From 2008 to 2013, me, Sasha, Anna, and later Inna, met every day. It took up all our life. We started speaking about women’s rights, and step by step we engaged in more political matters. We became more and more radical, and that led to being attacked by the government and the police. What we’ve been seeing for the last two or three years are activists who do three or four actions in the year and don’t work that well.” @beauxartsparis A post shared by Oxanashachko (@oksanashachko) on Mar 19, 2018 at 1:28am PDT In Paris, Shachko focused on her first passion, art. Since the age of 8, she had been trained in the art of religious iconography, and throughout her time in Femen, she used her artistic expression in her protests. Her later work combined those interests, with provocative feminist twists on traditional icons. She had her first solo show in Paris in 2016. In 2017, she told Crash that she was beginning to study at the École des Beaux-Arts. A post shared by Oxanashachko (@oksanashachko) on Mar 5, 2018 at 8:30am PST “I really want to continue doing some activism, but I need to think about it and adapt it to today’s world,” she said. In Femen’s statement, Shevchenko said that Shachko’s fight would continue. “Oksana Shachko may have left us, [but] she is here and everywhere,” she said in her email to Yahoo. “Her courage, her dedication and her passion will be here. She is within each of us whom she stood beside. She is in FEMEN, which she, herself co-founded. She is in her paintings, through which she manifested her unprecedented artistic talent. Oksana is in the history of feminism.” Read more from Yahoo Lifestyle: Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter for nonstop inspiration delivered fresh to your feed, every day.<doc-sep>
A founding member of the prominent protest group Femen, Oksana Shachko, has died in Paris in an apparent suicide, fellow members say, mourning the loss of a woman they called "a heroine of our time." Femen co-founder Anna Hutsol told RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service on July 24 that Shachko was dead, following reports that her body was found in her Paris apartment the previous day. "As far as I know, she was concerned that everything is going badly in the world," Hutsol said of Shachko. She added that "unfortunately," she and Shachko had not been in touch much lately. "RIP. The most fearless and vulnerable Oksana Shachko has left us," a post on the Femen website said. "We mourn together with her relatives and friends and [await] the official version from the police." "At the moment it is known that yesterday, July 23, Oksana’s body was found in her apartment in Paris. According to her friends, she left a suicide note," the post said. Click on image to open gallery. The second secretary at the Ukrainian Embassy in Paris, Oksana Lovha, confirmed Shachko's death to Current Time TV, the Russian-language network run by RFE/RL in cooperation with VOA. There was no public comment from French authorities, and Lovha said Ukrainian diplomats were awaiting further details from police. Founded in Ukraine a decade ago, Femen is known mainly for protests in which activists often bare their breasts -- sometimes exposing slogans written on their skin -- and disrupt political events or gatherings. Femen activists have rushed politicians such as Russian President Vladimir Putin and Czech President Milos Zeman, and public figures like American comic Bill Cosby. Often directed at leaders they describe as dictators or oppressors, their protests have also taken other forms and targeted issues such as the environment. A native of Ukraine who had lived in Paris in recent years, Shachko, 31, was one of a group of Femen activists who rushed Putin and German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Hannover, Germany, in 2013. Shachko was "a heroine of our time," a separate post on the Femen website said. "Oksana fought against injustice, fought for equality, fought like a hero for herself and for other women." "Oksana is no longer with us, but she is here, she is everywhere," it said. "Oksana... is in each of us, she is in FEMEN, and she is in the history of feminism." A post on the Telegram channel Paris Burns late on July 23 said that Shachko committed suicide and that the police had just removed her body from the apartment. It was not immediately possible to confirm the information in the Telegram post, which did not provide details or evidence. Another founding member of Femen, Oleksandra Shevchenko, told the BBC that Shachko had last been seen alive on July 20 and that it was not clear what day she died. "The autopsy will determine that," she said. Femen said in 2011 that Shachko was among three members seized by security officers after staging a topless protest mocking Belarusian President Alyaksandr Lukashenka. It said the officers forced them to strip naked, poured oil over them, threatened to set them on fire, and cut off their hair. Femen has said that Shachko was abducted again during a visit by Putin to Ukraine, and a lawyer for the group said she was beaten and briefly hospitalized. Femen now has branches on at least four continents. With reporting by the BBC​