On June 19, 2023, a photo started circulated on Facebook showing a group of people kneeling in front of a penis painted on the facade of a building. The painting is made in the colours of the Ukrainian flag and features the inscription “ПТН” in Russian. Some of the people in front of it are holding the Ukrainian flag. According to the attached description, the photo was taken in Canada, and the caption on it refers to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The disseminated photo is fabricated. The penis depicted on the facade of the building was not painted in Canada but in Sweden in 2018 and has no connection with Ukraine. The people in the foreground of the photo were added manually to it, as, in reality, they attended a public prayer held in Cherkasy, Ukraine, in 2017.
The photo disseminated on Facebook is altered. A penis painted on a five-story building is not located in Canada. It belonged to Swedish artist Carolina Falkholt and was displayed on a building in Stockholm in 2018. In the original version of the painting, there was no inscription in Russian on the genitals.
According to the author, the painting was called “Fuck the World”, and it had several symbolic meanings. The work expressed both the traumatic experience of her early sexualization and how difficult it is for an artist to stand firm in the name of creative freedom. It should be noted that the picture was repainted a week later.
According to Google Maps, for the month of March 2023, the wall now features a different painting.
Carolina Falkholt created a similar work in New York a year earlier. In this case, too, the painting was removed soon after the protest of the locals.
In addition, the group of people shown to be kneeling at the bottom of the photo is cropped and mirrored from a photo taken in Ukraine in 2017.
The original photo shows a prayer held in the central square of the Ukrainian city of Cherkasy in March 2017, which involved representatives of various denominations.
According to the organizer of the prayer, false information about the prayer was spread in the Russian media, as if local officials were forced to pray on the square where the monument to Stepan Bandera was planned to be erected.
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