‘Everything for Everybody: Archival resilience in wartime Ukraine’ - Viktoria Donovan
TUESDAY, 11 a.m. - 1 p.m. I Hybrid format I This talk presents and explores the questions central to the exhibition ‘Everything for Everybody’ (curators: Natasha Chychasova, Victoria Donovan, Kateryna Rusetska), which forms part of the Kyiv Biennale 2025 and is currently on display at the Dnipro Center for Contemporary Culture in Dnipro, Ukraine. ‘Everything for Everybody' raises questions about how archives come into being, who has access to their contents, and who controls their meaning. It explores the role of the archive during wartime and how these collections form unique testimonies about places that have vanished or been destroyed.
The exhibition takes as its point of departure two photographic archives from the UK and Ukraine: the Franki Raffles Photography Collection at the University of St Andrews and the Mykola Bilokon photographic archives held by the Pokrovsk Historical Museum. Despite the distances that separated these photographers in space and context, they shared common interests in documenting working-class life, gendered labour, and the shifting political landscape at the end of socialism. Their work raises issues about the politics of documentation and the factors governing the preservation of archival histories.
The exhibition's reflections on the nature of the archive unfold against the backdrop of the war’s reality, in which the Pokrovsk Historical Museum—which holds Bilokon’s legacy—has been evacuated, while the city itself is gradually turning into ruins. In this context, the exhibition’s title ‘Everything for Everybody’ reads both as a promise and a provocation: Whose stories are we archiving now, and for whom?
Professor Victoria Donovan (she/her/hers)
Director of the Centre for Russian, Soviet, Central and East European Studies: https://crscees.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk
AHRC Leadership Fellow on “Donbas in Focus: Visions of Industry in the Ukrainian East” (2020-2023): https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/modern-languages/research/projects/donbas-in-focus/
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