AVANT-GARDE CODES IN CONTEMPORARY UKRAINIAN ADVERTISING: THE AESTHETICS OF EXPERIMENTATION AND THE FORMATION OF CULTURAL IDENTITY

Abstract

The article offers a cultural-studies analysis of the transformation of avant-garde aesthetics in contemporary Ukrainian advertising and broader visual communication. The avant-garde is interpreted not as a completed historical style but as a system of cultural, visual, and communicative principles reactivated in the context of social transformation, war, and the reinterpretation of collective experience. The aim of the article is to identify the specific features of avant-garde codes in contemporary advertising practices and their role in the formation of cultural identity.
The methodological framework combines cultural, visual-semiotic, and interpretative approaches. The article analyses selected case studies of contemporary Ukrainian visual communication, including Chornobyl. The Vanishing Logo, We Build Ukraine, and TheDonationMap, which represent different ways of reactivating avant-garde logic – from formal reduction and work with visual emptiness to socially oriented design thinking, media transformation, and audience participation.
The study demonstrates that avant-garde codes in contemporary Ukrainian advertising perform not only aesthetic but also culture-producing functions: they concentrate meaning, activate interpretation, actualise historical memory, and contribute to the construction of cultural representations and collective identity. Drawing on Paul Ricoeur’s concept of identity, contemporary Ukrainian identity is understood as a dynamic process shaped through rupture, memory, narrative interpretation, and reconstruction. It is argued that contemporary Ukrainian visual communication reactivates the avant-garde as a cultural practice for interpreting social change and symbolically reproducing shared experience.