The project is aimed to support lens-based artists from Ukraine at a time when contemporary visual culture, has acquired new meaning and relevance in the context of Russian manipulative state-controlled media depictions of Ukraine and its people. The platform provides the means for mutual cognition and reflection, being a place for intellectual exchange between Ukraine and Europe. It will host online exhibitions curated by the project’s partners from around Europe which will offer a sequence of unique perspectives on Ukraine, telling its story through visual art. Idiosyncratic in nature, the project avoids being counter-propaganda or propaganda, aspiring instead to realize the potential of the photographic medium in a non-hierarchical environment, to seek ways in which photography can be meaningful today.
As well as being a platform for the support of Ukrainian photography, the project is designed to raise funds to contribute to humanitarian aid, without which the resistance of Ukrainian people against the Russian war machine would be impossible. Donations raised through the platform and received from partners will be divided evenly between Ukrainian photographers and charitable organizations which provide humanitarian aid to Ukraine.
On the 24th of February 2022, Russia brutally invaded Ukraine, starting the largest war in Europe since WWII. The short history of independent Ukraine is complex and filled with dramatic events that have attracted international attention. But despite the efforts of the Russian propaganda machine to distort the perception of Ukraine and to alienate it from Europe in every possible way, all the socio-political events in Ukraine were, in principle, manifestations of the people’s will for democracy and freedom. From the student protests in 1990 to the ‘Revolution of Dignity in 2013, this sequence of events constitutes one long and winding way towards freedom, democracy, and sovereignty.
Ukraine and its people have never desired the war; it is a nation that always desperately sought only peace, freedom, and development. But now it is impossible to talk about Ukraine, leaving the war outside the discourse. People in and outside Ukraine, Ukrainians or not, are now united in solidarity to help fight for freedom. They do their bit the same as we. We aim to stand together being a part of this network, to tell about people and what they do for Ukraine now.
