Will NobleUkraine: Photographs From The Frontline - Gut-Wrenching Exhibition Comes to London In 2023
A gut-wrenching exhibition comes to IWM London early next year, documenting life in Ukraine since Russian forces annexed Crimea in 2014, causing unrest that's since bubbled over into full-scale invasion.
Ukraine: Photographs from the Frontline is a powerful collection of 17 photos taken by English/Swedish photojournalist Anastasia Taylor-Lind in Ukraine over the past eight years — capturing the terrifying, ugly and tragic scenes from a country under siege.
The free exhibition comes to IWM London on 3 February 2023, after a stint at the sister IWM in Manchester this winter.
Taylor-Lind's images capture the full-throated opposition of Ukrainians in Kyiv, as they opted to remove the pro-Russian government in the "Revolution of Dignity", to seemingly peaceful images, such as that of a young child from the Grinik family feeding a horse in their garden.
War, violence and heartache, though, is never far away — that same garden was just 50 meters away from a Ukrainian frontline position, when photographed.
Inevitably, the toll of war rears its head — in a visit to a mine-strewn graveyard by a grieving mother, or an impersonal line-up of bodybags, as forensic investigators exhume a mass grave. One again, IWM will deliver an exhibition that brings a lump to throat.
During her time documenting this desperate period for Ukraine, Taylor-Lind worked alongside Ukrainian journalist Alisa Sopova, who provides captions and texts to accompany the exhibition. The voices of some of the subjects in the photos feature too, such as those of sisters Lyudmyla and Nelya Tkachenko, among the millions of Ukrainians who have now fled to Poland and elsewhere.
London has already witnessed some compelling Ukraine-centred artworks, not least with Visions of Home, scattered around Wembley Park. Anastasia Taylor-Lind's exhibition will again drum home the inconceivable horrors and grief that have been — and continue to be — felt by our European neighbours.
Ukraine: Photographs from the Frontline, IWM London, free, 3 February-7 May 2023