Mikhail Palinchak. War Photography 2022. Reportage photography of war in Ukraine that started on February 22 2022 will be presented. Palinchak is a street and documentary photographer from Kyiv who belongs to several professional organizations. He is the official photographer of the former President of Ukraine (2014-2019). Founder of Untitled magazine and co-founder of Ukrainian Street Photography group. Published in numerous magazines: TIME, The New York Times, Esquire, El Mundo, The Atlantic, The Guardian, Forbes.
Yana Sidach. Liberated Village. Moving with volunteers Sidach documents villages liberated from Russian occupation. Putting her gaze on the streets, destroyed local churches, burned civilian homes, wounded dogs and environmental portraits of people who are trying to rebuild something what they can. Sidach is a street and documentary photographer from Lviv, Ukraine. Winner of numerous street photography awards and ICP program student.
Sergey Vaganov. Desaturation. The series depicts Mariupol border reportage volunteers in the summer of 2014. While in photography, desaturation means the reduction of pigment in paint, in medicine, saturation means oxygen saturation in the blood. As the author himself says, the war punched in a stomach and knocked the air out, desaturation for him means suffocation. Vaganov is a photojournalist who studied medicine and worked as a traumatologist, later as a photo correspondent in Donetsk, contributing to national and international agencies.
The projects of the authors have been curated by Okapi Galerii gallerist Temuri Khvingia, photo artist and gallerist, and Andrii Mur, Ukrainian street and documentary photographer living in Estonia. The exhibition is prepared in cooperation with the festival Odessa Photo Days (Kateryna Radchenko), the association of Ukrainian street photographers community and with the founder of Untitled magazine (Mikhail Palinchak).
On the Edge Fest will be open 24/7 on the Baltic Station Art Street (Reisijate Str, Tallinn) until October 20. In addition, as part of the festival, an exhibition has already been opened in the OKAPI Gallery and in the Telliskivi Creative City Outdoor Gallery, next one will be opened in the Georgian 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 problem. The ambition of the project is to develop it into a thematic and regular festival, which involves various institutions and partners, 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 autumn of 2021, yet it became even more relevant with Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022 that 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 an actual 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.
