Den’s Photo Exhibition has spent a record amount of time in Lutsk this year – it was open to the Volynians through April 8 to May 22. Not only the book of reviews shows words of admiration, pride and pain, the courage and misfortune that have befallen Ukraine in the past two years – it reflects an especially wide range of visitors. A professor, several students groups, professional and amateur photographers, schoolchildren, a teacher, a local historian... Our newspaper asked Taras LITKOVETS, deputy dean at the History Department of Lesia Ukrainka Eastern European National University, for a commentary to sum up the exhibition. The historian and political scientist also has some battle experience: he was drafted into the Armed Forces of Ukraine and served as Deputy commander at a motorized infantry battalion.
Taras mentioned the words of Larysa Ivshyna, editor-in-chief of Den/The Day, which she spoke at the exhibition’s opening in Lutsk: “No aggressive neighbor can deprive us of our identity and unity if we refer to our history. Our exhibition is alive; it excites and shows all the pain and heroism our country has.”
“I saw the things the country went through in 2015 – as I had spent that year in the ATO zone and my perception of the events was distorted. Ukraine in Flames was the name of Oleksandr Dovzhenko’s documentary about World War II. Paradoxically, 73 years later the bitter fate of Ukrainians repeats again, only this time the enemy comes not from the West, but from the East. The enemy did not come with an open attack, they came with a ‘hybrid war,’ with the slogans of ‘Slavic unity’ to hide it,” says Litkovets. “The first thing that caught my eye this time was the militant spirit of the exhibition, a difference from all the previous ones. There are fewer pictures of a happy life; there are more bunkers, infantry fighting vehicles, tanks, cannons, armored vehicles on agricultural fields. The war is reflected in every face and every glance from most of the photos. This does not fit at all with day and night television commercials about some other, parallel world of life in Ukraine. The photo artists’ works let us see and remember the last year’s clashes with the police near the parliament (which the ATO soldiers call ‘Verkhovna Zrada’ [‘The Supreme Treason’]). Also, the exhibition pays much attention to a topic which is not that new – the fate of displaced persons from the Donbas. The overall focus is on the daily life of Ukrainian heartland, where celebration and sorrow, joy and sadness are bound together. This time the portrait photo was in the spotlight – it provides a reflection of the nation’s soul in 2015. And deep inside our souls an unimaginable psychological mix of emotions persists, and it is both interesting and scary at the same time. All the works are rich on information, meaningful, and deep; every one of them takes time to look and feel it. The photos show the inconsistency of 2015, a year during which a radical change of citizens’ values had happened. Military photographs clearly show that life is the most precious thing, not the thickness of one’s wallet. ‘Reading’ the photographs provides an answer to the difficult questions of why the ATO is so overextended in time; of migration from the Donbas; of the lack of real reform; of the dissonance between the reality and the official speeches of the state leaders. Every picture is moving, revealing, and painful; it shows the ambiguity of the present day, the ordinary human feelings, the desire to live regardless of the war and death around us – regardless of the pain, tears, sadness, and hope. Today is the time of deceitful politics – a consequence of the political elites’ double standards, of their lack of knowledge in the country’s history, and of their failure to produce a systematic approach in fixing the government through reforms.
“Personally for me, the photo called The Real Apocalypse (by Serhii Hudok, Uzhhorod) is the symbol of today’s invincibility of Ukraine. The photo shows storks on a field ablaze. We have the same thing today: ‘everything is lost’ all around us, but the stork endures on the ashes.”
