Ensuring cultural support for Ukraine

Open Eye Gallery is honoured to have hosted a Cultural Support for Ukraine night, with Lord Bradley and the University of Salford. 

Tetyana Filevska, Creative Director of Ukrainian Institute, shared a video message as she travelled from New York back to Ukraine, giving us an insight into the incredible pressure on everyone from Ukraine who is trying to work diplomatically.

We were delighted to welcome Alex Sobel, Member of Parliament of the United Kingdom, who, together with Estonian ambassador Sven Sakkov, reinforced our message in working collaboratively with Eastern Europe.

Talk by Open Eye Gallery’s curator Max Gorbatskyi focused on the reality of working with Ukrainian creatives at this time and emphasised their impact, pointing to works of Elena Subach in collaboration with Superhumans Rehabilitation Centre for war trauma (Open Eye Gallery’s current outside walls exhibition) and Happy Days by Igor Chekachkov, which reflects on Igor’s work as a linguist and, later, a photographer on a military base where Ukrainian soldiers were training with the British army (Digital Window Gallery).

As a curator, I’ve witnessed how deeply people connect with culture. This spring, at Open Eye Gallery, we held a symposium on war photography. One of our speakers was Evgeniy Maloletka, the Ukrainian photographer and World Press Photo winner who remained in Mariupol after its occupation, risking his life to document the harsh realities of the besieged city. No one could remain indifferent as he spoke and showed his photographs.

 

We launched the Home exhibition in 2023. It focused on the simple idea of what home means for us by bringing together diverse personal stories of Ukrainian artists. Later, the exhibition travelled across the UK in 2024. And I remember being at The Turnpike Gallery in Leigh, Wigan, where a group of young people engaged with something powerful and immediate — something that rarely enters their world. This is why we work in culture: because of the effect it has on people.

 

People are no longer watching the news; they are caught in social media silos. But when they step into an exhibition, they step into another world. The Home project reached more than 400,000 people across the UK and Ukraine. And that engagement allowed audiences to see Ukrainians not as distant or abstract, but simply as people — people like everyone here.

 

Unless we work together — unless we see ourselves as European citizens, as a collective that shares values and is ready to defend them — we risk sleepwalking into disaster. Not only for Europe, but for the wider international ideals of unity, freedom and democracy.

Sarah Fisher, executive director at Open Eye Gallery, asked the many attendees from the cultural sector, politics and funding bodies to think about what they can do in support of Ukraine. This was echoed in Alex Sobel’s concluding speech, in which he stated that we need to consistently work with Ukraine to stop the erasure of not just Ukrainian land and Ukrainian people, but also Ukrainian culture.