Join us to explore the Liverpool city region and celebrate Ukrainian culture! Open Eye Gallery and University of Liverpool have partnered to launch an exciting new app for EuroFestival to lead visitors to different locations on the Home Trails, highlighting what Home means for diverse perspectives. 

App Store   Google Play

An app designed by the University of Liverpool team will lead EuroFestival guests and Liverpool locals to independent spaces to see Home-themed Ukrainian photography collections in five trails across the city region. The themes of the trails are Land, Making, Liberty, Resistance, Settings. The twenty-five places on the trails include cafes, shops, museums and galleries. Each place will have an artwork by a contemporary Ukrainian photographer and a postcard for sale – profit will go to the Hospitallers medical group, an organisation focusing on sourcing and delivering medical supplies for paramedics who save human lives in Ukraine. 

We invite everyone to collect the postcards and upload your own poem, lyric or a letter in response to Open Eye Stories: just leave a comment under a photo that you have chosen. 

 Step-by-Step Guide:

• First, download the app onto your smartphone. 
• Locate the five Home Trails leading to twenty-five independent venues in the Liverpool city region with their own artwork and postcard available for sale. 
• Share your experience of Ukrainian photography with us! Post a written response, a poem, or a letter to a photographer at Open Eye Stories.  
• Post a selfie or a photo with a Ukrainian artwork and use the hashtag #withukrainianculture on social media.

Exhibitions in Liverpool City Region

Each trail ends in a unique exhibition: 

• Williamson Art Gallery & Museum (April 26 – May 27, open Weds – Thurs 10–5:30pm, Friday 10:30 – 9pm, Saturday 10 – 4:30pm). This exhibition offers various interpretations of the concept of ‘Resistance’ by bringing together the work of 3 different Ukrainian photographers. Mykhaylo Palinchak had never covered military conflicts before but after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, he transformed his photographic practices to record the atrocities committed by the Russian army and the resistance of the Ukrainian people.  At this time, Andrii Rachynskiy also turns to the documentary genre recording the widespread practice of people painting over the road signs and toponyms to disorient the occupation army. Elena Subach’s project ‘Lamkist’ (Fragility) is aimed at the poetisation and monumentalisation of mundane and fragile ordinary things, a reflection on the often unnoticed artefacts of the everyday. It reveals the presence of resistance in the coming together and coming apart of natural and man-made objects.
• Norton Priory (27 April – 31 May, open Fri – Tues 10 – 5pm). The two featured Ukrainian photography projects demonstrate different aspects of being with a place – from owning to conquering it to cultivating or occupying it. In Anatoliy Babiychuk’s project, the village of Horaivka stands as an exemplary story of a small village that has kept a traditional way of living, cultivating a deep connection with the land typical of Ukrainian tradition. Exhibited in the walled garden, Black on Prussian Blue by Andriy Dostliev and Lia Dostlieva explores the notion of a perpetrator’s gaze based on the study of the photographs from the family album of a Wehrmacht soldier who served in the Luftwaffe during WWII.
• Kirkby Gallery (01 May – 15 June, open Mon – Sat 10 – 5pm). Nazar Furyk represents the generation of artists whose practices are characterised by an exploratory approach to photographic imagery and photographic subjects. His project “Simple Things” blurs the boundaries of photographic genres searching for new pictorial forms or questioning the role of the medium today.  
• Unity Theatre (01 – 12 May, open Thurs – Saturday 10 – 10pm). ‘To Know Us Better’ project by Anton Shebetko celebrates queer Ukrainians who are living or temporarily staying in Europe. Their experience and hopes for a better future are documented in a series of portraits and heartfelt interviews. 
• The Atkinson (04 May – 15 June, open Mon – Sat 10 – 4pm). The projects ‘My World is not Real Enough for an Apocalypse’ by Sasha Kurmaz and ‘Dreamland Donbas’ by  Viktor Marushchenko were both shot in the Donetsk region but at different times and told about different people and communities.  The heroes and heroines of Marushchenko’s photographs are the illegal coal miners trying to make ends meet. Kurmaz’s story is about the ‘social life of the young generation in the Donetsk region, its form and relationship in the environment.’ 

Home Trails is a part of the HOME programme.

Funders: DCMS, The British Council, Spirit of 2012, Arts Council England.

Supporters: Ukrainian Institute, Liverpool ONE, Liverpool BID.

Partners: Ukrainian.Photographies, Ukrainian Institute, dot-art, Kirkby Gallery, The Atkinson, Norton Priory, Unity Theatre, Williamson Art Gallery and Museum, Merseyrail, National Poetry Library, University of Liverpool, The Poetry Society, The Double Negative, Liverpool Poetry Space, Hurricane Films, Arthouse Traffic Films, Tilly Hire, Ocean Outdoor.

Home Trails venues: 92 Degrees Southport, Tempest, Mersey Made, Hafla Hafla, SUP, 92 Degrees Baltic, The Brink, Keith’s, Arts Bar Hope Street, 92 degrees (Hardman Street), The World of Glass Museum, Dead Ink Books, Shenanigans, Nova Scotia, Arts Bar Baltic, Bold Street Coffee, Victoria Gallery and Museum, The Egg Cafe, Ropes and Twines, Press Bros.

With kind support from EuroFestival. Commissioned by Culture Liverpool / Liverpool City Council.