A Maidan Photo Exhibit by the Kule Folklore Centre generated strong feedback at the University of Alberta. Viewer comments filled several poster boards, and questions were fielded for hours on end when the photos were displayed at the Central Academic Building in March.
Nataliya Bezborodova went through hundreds of pictures that have appeared on social media sites around the world and, together with Larisa Cheladyn and Maryna Chernyavska, prepared a photo display outlining the current events happening in Ukraine that are impacting the world. With its 25 striking photos, the exhibit tells the story that started as peaceful demonstrations by the people of Ukraine to secure freedoms and rights that many in the world enjoy to the actions of a corrupt government firing on their own people and killing over a 100 innocent demonstrators to the standoff between Ukraine and Russia that is happening today.
Nataliya Bezborodova, Kateryna Kod and Olha Ivanova, (all graduate students in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies) attended the exhibit and passed out information about the Ukrainian Maidan, and engaged with students and others passing by. Clearly, the general population at the university is quite interested in these political developments, and is hungry for more, and more balanced, information.
One of the key mandates of the Kule Folklore Centre is community engagement. With encouragement from our home department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies, we are active in this area. This is the most recent of five successful displays on Ukrainian culture developed by the Kule Folklore Centre, presented to hundreds of thousands of viewers at festivals and other events across Canada.
Nataliya Bezborodova, herself from Kyiv, is one of the many Ukrainian graduate students at the University of Alberta who have had a hard time focusing on their studies while critical events are shaking their homeland this school year. Nataliya is working on her Master's thesis in Ukrainian folklore, analyzing personal experience narratives from participants in the Euromaidan phenomenon. She has a huge database of narratives collected from facebook during the critical months of the Maidan. A folkloristic exploration of the stories can show how personal experiences illuminate many elements not exposed by normal media coverage and official reports. The Euromaidan phenomenon is a rich source of contemporary and urban folklore, a physical and social site that continues to generate a great deal of creative human expressions.
Nataliya and the Kule Folklore Centre are also participating in a longer-term project which aims to provide an international research forum where academics and students share, discuss, explore, reflect upon, develop, and transform understandings about the EuroMaidan in Ukraine. See Euromaidan website for more information.
Oleksandr Pankieiev created a video of our exhibition in progress which can be seen here.
Photo courtesy of Olha Hodovanets
Related articles: Ukraine - #Maidan - Україна