The artist Sara Nesteruk’s Recipes for Baking Bread is series of short, evocative films that explore the horrors of the Holodomor genocide in Ukraine in the 1930s. Killing around £7 million people (reports on the exact figures vary) between 1932 and 1933, Holodomor created scarcity, hunger and fear among rural subsistence farmers, who were compelled by Stalin’s forces to give up their land to collectivisation and state ownership.

Nesteruk grounds the viewer in the act of baking bread, showing how it rocketed in value and was turned into an oppressive and exclusionary tool of the Soviet state. Loosely structured around the component ingredients of salt, flour, yeast and water, Recipes for Baking Bread is episodic in structure, yet it’s far from a linear or straightforward narrative. Cut out images flicker across the screen as a song appears to play backwards. Shadowy figures take shape alongside images of industry, agriculture and production, from tools and livestock to tractors and stoves. The viewer is presented with maps of Ukraine’s industry and the country’s changing borders, yet it’s hard to get a firm grip on what we’re seeing. In creating this slippery sense of history, Nesteruk evokes a sense of confusion, obfuscation and fear, and suggests that narratives inevitably vary according to who is in the position of power to tell a story (Holodomor was unacknowledged by the Soviet Union at the time, and denial continues to this day).

Recipes for Baking Bread offers a creative approach to presenting events that are both within living memory yet cannot be fully known, in part due to deliberate cover-ups and underreporting of the situation for political reasons, both in Moscow and Britain. While not following any one individual’s story in detail, the narrative threads are multiple and interwoven: a sense of tragedy on both a national and a familial level is never far away. Nesteruk’s sketches are interspersed with fragments of archival sources, often scrolling across the screen like a newsflash, appearing too quickly to grasp the full picture. Personal experience permeates the film, drawing on first-hand storytelling, oral testimonies and witness reports, from hand-written letters to newspaper reportage. The effect is to suggest that memory is unreliable and highlight the difficulty of discerning fact from fiction – especially in the case of events which are contested and divide people and families.

In spite of its impressionistic nature, there’s one central image that has stayed with me after watching the film: the pair of disembodied hands that appear periodically throughout, going through the repetitive physical motions of kneading bread (one assumes this from the voiceover to be paska, a sweet, brioche-like bread eaten at easter in Ukraine). These strong, rhythmic hands are shown in outline (black on white or vice versa); Nesteruk homes in on the isolated body part and the act of baking bread, something that is in some ways universal yet at the same time culturally, regionally and ethnically specific. Rather than belonging to any individual, the image foregrounds collective tradition and identity, suggesting the importance of shared cultures in helping pass on – or literally handing down – stories and understanding, and acknowledging the enduring legacy of trauma across generations.

The artist Sara Nesteruk’s Recipes for Baking Bread is series of short, evocative films that explore the horrors of the Holodomor genocide in Ukraine in the 1930s. Killing around £7 million people (reports on the exact figures vary) between 1932 and 1933, Holodomor created scarcity, hunger and fear among rural subsistence farmers, who were compelled by Stalin’s forces to give up their land to collectivisation and state ownership.

Nesteruk grounds the viewer in the act of baking bread, showing how it rocketed in value and was turned into an oppressive and exclusionary tool of the Soviet state. Loosely structured around the component ingredients of salt, flour, yeast and water, Recipes for Baking Bread is episodic in structure, yet it’s far from a linear or straightforward narrative. Cut out images flicker across the screen as a song appears to play backwards. Shadowy figures take shape alongside images of industry, agriculture and production, from tools and livestock to tractors and stoves. The viewer is presented with maps of Ukraine’s industry and the country’s changing borders, yet it’s hard to get a firm grip on what we’re seeing. In creating this slippery sense of history, Nesteruk evokes a sense of confusion, obfuscation and fear, and suggests that narratives inevitably vary according to who is in the position of power to tell a story (Holodomor was unacknowledged by the Soviet Union at the time, and denial continues to this day).

Recipes for Baking Bread offers a creative approach to presenting events that are both within living memory yet cannot be fully known, in part due to deliberate cover-ups and underreporting of the situation for political reasons, both in Moscow and Britain. While not following any one individual’s story in detail, the narrative threads are multiple and interwoven: a sense of tragedy on both a national and a familial level is never far away. Nesteruk’s sketches are interspersed with fragments of archival sources, often scrolling across the screen like a newsflash, appearing too quickly to grasp the full picture. Personal experience permeates the film, drawing on first-hand storytelling, oral testimonies and witness reports, from hand-written letters to newspaper reportage. The effect is to suggest that memory is unreliable and highlight the difficulty of discerning fact from fiction – especially in the case of events which are contested and divide people and families.

In spite of its impressionistic nature, there’s one central image that has stayed with me after watching the film: the pair of disembodied hands that appear periodically throughout, going through the repetitive physical motions of kneading bread (one assumes this from the voiceover to be paska, a sweet, brioche-like bread eaten at easter in Ukraine). These strong, rhythmic hands are shown in outline (black on white or vice versa); Nesteruk homes in on the isolated body part and the act of baking bread, something that is in some ways universal yet at the same time culturally, regionally and ethnically specific. Rather than belonging to any individual, the image foregrounds collective tradition and identity, suggesting the importance of shared cultures in helping pass on – or literally handing down – stories and understanding, and acknowledging the enduring legacy of trauma across generations.