When Russian troops invaded Ukraine in February 2022, what many people considered unimaginable ocurred: One European country attacked another. The exhibition "Independence! Photographs from Ukraine, 1991-2023" illustrates that the outbreak of war is not the beginning, but the dramatic escalation of a conflict between two states that has existed for a long time. The works of well-known Ukrainian photographers tell the eventful history of the second largest European country since ist independence in 1991. Chronologically divided into four parts, the exhibition documents the struggle for state independence, national identity and democracy: from the raising of the Ukrainian national flag on the parliament building in 1991, to an Euromaidan activist in front of burning barricades in 2014 and a caretaker in a school destroyed by rockets in the Donetsk region in 2017, to the evacuation of citizens after flooding caused by the destruction of the Kakhovka dam in 2023.
Ukrainian journalists often risk their lives for their work. Selected objects from the everyday work of the photographers Mstyslav Chernov and Evgeniy Maloletka are a vivid example of this. The photographers report at the risk of their lives from the encircled city of Mariupol in 2022. The work of their team was honored with the Pulitzer Prize in 2023. We show selected photographs of them, as well as objects such as a microphone and a camera that they used in their work.
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