Wednesday 5 November 2025 / 06.30pm – 07.45pm / The Photographers’ Gallery / book your ticket
Emerging from heavily constructed narratives such as domestic (otechestvennaya) or Soviet photography, Ukrainian photography is gradually rediscovering its genealogy and profound connection to the historical events that shaped contemporary Ukraine. These events have long drawn the attention of photographers with a documentary sensibility, compelled by truthful depictions of significant social and political transformations.
Curators and researchers Max Gorbatskyi and Michael Kurtz, contributors to the recent Open Eye Gallery’s publication Researching and Curating Photography from Ukraine: Reflections, Perspectives, Challenges (89books, 2025), join the book’s editor Kateryna Filyuk in conversation to examine key milestones and figures in the development of Ukrainian photography from the mid-20th century to the present day. The conversation will also reflect on photography’s role in bearing witness to pivotal historical moments such as the Chornobyl disaster, the Revolution of Dignity, and the ongoing war.
This event is part of the exhibition programme for Boris Mikhailov: Ukrainian Diary at The Photographers’ Gallery and is in partnership with Ukraine Institute London.
Playlist: Researching and Curating Photography from Ukraine: perspectives, reflections, challenges
Home. Perspectives. Contemporary Ukrainian photography exhibition at Open Eye Gallery, 2023
Kateryna Filyuk is a curator and researcher, who holds PhD from the University of Palermo. In 2017-2021 she served as a chief curator at Izolyatsia., a Platform for cultural initiatives in Kyiv. Before joining Izolyatsia, she was co-curator of the Festival of Young Ukrainian Artists at Mystetskyi Arsenal, Kyiv (2017). The co-founder of the publishing house 89books in Palermo, she has participated in curatorial programmes at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo (Turin, 2017), De Appel (Amsterdam, 2015–16), the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (Seoul, 2014) and the Gwangju Biennale (2012). In 2023 Filyuk was a visiting PhD student at the Central European University (Vienna) and in 2024 a visiting researcher at FOTOHOF Archiv (Salzburg) and the Predoctoral Fellow at the Bibliotheca Hertziana (Rome). Currently she develops a two-year scholarly initiative – the Methodology Seminars for Art History in Ukraine in collaboration with the Bibliotheca Hertziana and the Max Weber Foundation’s Research Centre Ukraine.
Max Gorbatskyi is a curator at Open Eye Gallery (Liverpool, UK). Together with Viktoria Bavykina, he has been named curator of the Ukrainian Pavillion at the 60th Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia in 2024. Previously, Gorbatskyi was a curator at tat Ukraine’s flagship cultural institution Mystetskyi Arsenal (Kyiv, Ukraine), where he focused on developing photography programmes and exhibitions. He worked extensively with archival and contemporary photography. Among the last projects he curated was a large-scale survey of the last three decades of photography in Ukraine, entitled Sensitivity. Contemporary Ukrainian Photography and a research project “Archive of photographer Oleksandr Ranchukov”, dedicated to the private archive of a late Kyiv based documentary photographer. Max is a co-founder of the Ukrainian Photographies platform, which features online exhibitions and articles with the aim to ensure the resilience and visibility of Ukrainian art and contemporary visual culture.
Max studied MA History of Photography at Birkbeck, University of London and MA Arts management at the University of Bologna. Together with Bavykina they collaborated with Open Eye Gallery on the HOME programme, which was the largest exhibition of Ukrainian photography in the UK to date, showing in over 40 sites.
Michael Kurtz is a writer, researcher and curator based in London. He is the recipient of the 2023 International Awards for Art Criticism First Prize. His writing is primarily concerned with contemporary photography and art that engages critically with digital culture. He read History of Art at the University of Oxford, where he won the Gibbs Prize in 2019. Since then, he has held curatorial positions at Waddesdon Manor, Four Corners Gallery and the Jean Jones Estate, as well as completing a Master’s degree in the History of Photography at Birkbeck, University of London, funded by the Wallace Studentship. His art criticism has appeared in Art Monthly, e-flux, The London Magazine and ArtReview, and in 2024 he published an article about Baptist missionary photography in Angola in Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics. As research assistant to art historian Michael Peppiatt, he recently contributed to the editing of Francis Bacon’s collected writings.