‘Ukraine From Within’ is a week-long exhibition at the Social Science Library to mark the fourth anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on 24 February. The art books on display celebrate Ukraine’s creativity, diversity, and determination.

The exhibition takes its title from Ukraїner’s photography book, Країна Зсередини, or ‘Ukraine from within’. This book is part of a multimodal project to document and present the experiences of ordinary Ukrainians, kick-started by Bohdan Lohvynenko in 2016. He and several volunteers travelled across Ukraine from 2016 – 2018, collecting stories and images from Ukraine’s citizens. Their aim was to create a true portrait of Ukraine in all its diversity of community and landscape, through the voices of individual people. Each section carries a QR code, linking to online material. The Ukrainian text can be translated using the Google Translate smartphone app.

Країна Зсередини testifies to the variety of ethnic identity across Ukraine. Memory Guardians speaks for one of these ethnic groups, the Romani people. It offers an account of Romani suffering and survival through the biography of one Roma man, Ivan Bilashchenko, presented as a graphic story. Bilashchenko survived the Holodomor famine of the 1930s, the Nazi genocide of the Romani, and the Second World War, to tell his story to the Roma youth organisation TENET in 2018. He lived to see yet another invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, before his passing in 2023.

Листи на Війну, or Letters on the War, presents the thoughts of Ukrainian children. These letters written by children to soldiers were collected in 2015 – after the annexation of Crimea and the start of the wars in Luhansk and Donetsk regions, but before the full-scale invasion. Designer Olena Staranchuk has arranged these letters and their English translations, without altering their contents. They suggest their authors had a deeper grasp of the situation than some adults. For example, nine-year-old Iaryk wrote simply, “Soldier, I am very happy that you are reading this. Thank you for protecting me, my mother, and my cat.”

Finally, Харківська Школа Фотографії: Гра Проти Апарату (‘The Kharkiv School of Photography: Play Versus the Apparatus’) reveals the subversive power of amateur photography. Amateur photography was popular in the Soviet Union from the 1960s onwards. A series of amateur photographic clubs in Kharkiv created their own form of avant-garde art, which posed a playful but radical challenge to conventional Soviet aesthetics. Only one of these photographers became well-known – Boris Mikhailov, who took part in the first of these clubs during the early 1970s. Hence the book’s author Nadiia Bernar-Koval’chuk found herself initiating a collaborative project to reclaim these bodies of work from numerous personal archives; like Lohvynenko, she acknowledges the dedicated work of many volunteers in the book’s production.

Some readers may find text and images in these books upsetting, or shocking. We hope that readers will also find inspiration in the determination of Ukrainians to keep laughing, loving, creating and communicating, whatever the world may throw at them. The University of Oxford’s statement and resources on Ukraine can be found here.

You can find the books on display around the corner from our issue desk. All items are currently for use in the library only.