In June this year, DART contributing editor, Margaret Morton, reported on the takeover by pro-Russian separatists, of the Izolyatsia Foundation Art Center, in Donetsk, Ukraine.

A month later, she reported that the separatists, who had turned the art center into a military training base, had also interfered with the international investigation of the Malaysian Airways Flight 17 crash site.

Today she forwarded an article from the New York Times, which reports that the Izolyatsia Foundation Art Center is now a prison, where political activist Dmytro O. Potekhin was detained for 48 days. The report reads,

“To clear space for the prison, fighters with the Donetsk People’s Republic smashed art in the gallery, including a large outdoor installation of mirrors that they found objectionable.

Pro-Russian militants on maneuvers in eastern Ukraine. Photo: Roman Pilipey/EPR.

 “The interior layout had not changed much from its days as a gallery, Mr. Potekhin said, other than the addition of a few buckets for use as toilets, a horrible stench and blood-chilling wails.

“’It was absolutely terrible,’ he said in a recent interview. He said he was subjected to mock executions and questioned in a room with children’s art hanging on the walls. Rebels kept, by his estimation, hundreds of detainees in the locked gallery spaces, where the screams from nightly beatings echoed through the building.

“’It’s a combination of 1917 and 1937,’ he said, referring to the Bolshevik Revolution and one of the darker years of Stalin’s reign.

“Military tribunals have ordered the incarceration of an estimated 1,000 people. ‘It’s a police state with no court system,’ Mr. Potekhinsaid. ‘I was kept because there is no system of releasing people. There is a very advanced, very violent system of capturing people, but no system to release them.’” More.

 Zakhoplennya, a Ukranian word that means "forcible seizure."

The Izolyatsia Foundation Art Center, under the direction of its founder, Luba Michailova, continues its programs in exile in Kyiv [Kiev]. Currently, the work of New York-based artist and Cooper Union graduate, Joe Riley, is being presented as part of Zahoplennya, a program organized by Clemens Poole, another Cooper Union graduate, which, according to the website, builds upon “the forcible seizure (of property, space, physical objects), and the experience of utter fascination or being captivated by profound emotion (such as being in love). This program of temporary public art installations throughout the city of Kyiv, will continue through October 12, 2014. The project challenges artists and viewers, according to the website, "to creatively address our changing physical, emotional, and social concepts of occupation." More.