“Buy an Icon – Save a Life” is an art project of Kyivan artists Sofia Atlantova and Oleksandr Klymenko aimed to support the Pirogov First Volunteer Mobile Hospital (PFVMH), a non-government project that employs civilian medics to provide medical aid to both militants and civilians in the Anti-Terrorist Operation (ATO) zone in Eastern Ukraine. Icons are painted on boards recovered from ammunition boxes from the ATO zone.
Exhibitions of the icons on ammo boxes, brought from the combat zone, have already been held at the European Parliament, Parliaments of Ukraine and Lithuania, St. Sophia Cathedral in Kyiv, Kyiv Pechersk Lavra, and the Lithuanian Embassy in Ukraine.
The icons have been displayed in The Hague, Antwerp, Berlin, Frankfurt am Main, Munich, Hanover, Leipzig, Bonn, Cologne, Warsaw, Vienna, Lublin, Prague, Rome, Milan, and Catania on Sicily, as well as the Ukrainian cities of Lviv, Lutsk, Mariupol, Dnipro, Kamyanske, and Pokrovsk. Exhibitions of the icons on ammo boxes were also part of the 25th Economic Forum in Krynica, Poland, and the 8th Kyiv Security Forum, and were held in the University of Alberta in Canada, the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv and the Superior Institute of Religious Sciences of St. Thomas Aquinas in Kyiv.
