For years, 36-year-old Ukrainian artist Olena Kharakhulakh had put her art on hold, choosing instead a steady job designing glass objects for a company. That changed when a Russian missile hit an apartment block 300 metres from her home in eastern Ukraine, killing 45 people.JOIN US ON TELEGRAMFollow our coverage of the war on the @Kyivpost_official. Choking back tears when recalling the attack, she said that was the moment she decided to go into art full-time. “I realised that there would never be a convenient moment and that you have to do what you want right now,” said Kharakhulakh, one of many Ukrainian artists for whom Russia’s invasion was a turning point. “To be reborn, we need to get rid of something –- not literally, not physically, but we need to destroy or even kill something within ourselves,” Kharakhulakh told AFP from Kyiv’s Lavra art gallery. Her latest collages -- part of the second edition of the Kyiv Art Fair -- show classical statues with sliced faces, sharp blades and ominous smoke: a reflection of her own transformation. - ‘Love letter’ - Another artist, Vlada Lobus, whose works were also displayed at the fair, was forced to leave Dnipro and seek refuge in Poland. A graduate in political economy, she turned to painting and then analogue photography to process the shock of war and displacement. In one self-portrait, she reassembles cyanotype photographs of herself in a disjointed order: an eye, hands, an elbow, the soft curves of a body.