Anna Melnikova. City No Name. The photo project created together with Dima Krasny represents an attempt to create a new reality within one image and to show how the city distorts the personality as easily as we distort the image of the city. Melnikova is a photographer, artist, curator, and teacher who has participated in exhibitions and festivals in Ukraine and Europe, including presenting her book on gender studies at the UNSEEN festival in Amsterdam. Her photographic works belong to private collections in Holland, Italy, and Belgium. For the past three years, she has taught master classes and given workshops across Europe. Currently, she is the main curator and organizer of the Ukrainian Women Photography Organization.
Maxim Dondyuk. Apeiron. An abstract series that consists of found old films that were lost and forgotten several decades ago in the cities and villages of Chernobyl. For more than 35 years these negatives had been laying in dilapidated, looted houses, being subject to very slow degradation under the influence of radiation and the elements of nature. Passing through stages of disappearance, erasure, and decay, they retained the traces of evidence of bodies or things that left their mark on the photosensitive film emulsion.
Maxim Dondyuk. Traces of War. War devastates everything. It cripples human souls and bodies, destroys buildings, and harms nature. There are no winners and no losers. All that remains are destruction, pain, and suffering. It puts an unforgettable footprint on everything that touches. Starting from the revolution of 2013-14, Dondyuk is chronicling this long-lasting battle of the Ukrainian people for freedom, independence, and national identity.
Shilo group. Chronicle. Arranged in chronological order, the photos from 2010-2015 form book chapters that function simultaneously as reactions to life changes and as documentation of these reactions. Scenes from the Kharkiv frontline, revolutionary Kyiv, Donetsk, and Luhansk regions are the ones that will determine the future of Ukraine and the whole of Europe. Shilo Group was founded in 2010 by photographers Sergiy Lebedynskyy and Vladyslav Krasnoshchok and has taken part in several international festivals and exhibitions.
The projects of the authors have been curated by photo artist and gallerist from OKAPI gallery Temuri Khvingia, and Andrii Mur, Ukrainian street and documentary photographer living in Estonia. The exhibition is prepared in cooperation with the festival Odesa Photo Days (Kateryna Radchenko) and with the association of Ukrainian street photographers community Untitled (Mikhail Palinchak).
On the Edge Fest will be open 24/7 in the Telliskivi Creative City Gallery Outdoor Gallery (Telliskivi 60a, Tallinn) until October 20. In addition, as part of the festival, an exhibition has already been opened in OKAPI Gallery and on the Baltic Station Art Street, next one will be opened in the restaurant Lendav Maaler on August 21. Visiting is for free.
On the Edge Fest is a new long-term project, the content of which is to take a closer look at borderline conflicts in different regions, especially where there has been war or other current social problems. The ambition of the project is to develop it into a thematic and regular festival, which involves various institutions and partners and includes both indoor and urban spaces for a visual display, as well as educational and additional programs.
The pilot phase of the project is an exposition of Ukrainian photo art, which explores the hidden tensions, as well as geopolitical, psychological and self-identical fears both inside of a country itself and in relationship with its neighbors. By describing the decay of the almost surreal periods authors reach the edges – fringe areas and fields of life, which seems to be forgotten by the whole world. This way, they provide us an opportunity to self-reflect, reminding us that freedom and dignity are genuine values of the true society which cares about their own cultural heritage and builds their independent future regardless of the sneaky intentions of aggressors which act under the red veil of common past and present.
The topic was picked in the autumn of 2021, yet it became even more relevant with Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022 which has changed our lives. We stand with the Ukrainian people as they fight for their freedom, presenting the works of Ukrainian authors in Estonia is a symbolic as well as a true statement of support – the exhibition is accompanied by a charity fundraiser, as was also the case at the exhibition on Ukrainian frontline photography in the Okapi Gallery in the spring of 2022.
