Victoria Donovan: Thank you for mentioning your work, and also the anxieties you had about doing the exhibition in Kharkiv at this time, because I often have these same anxieties as a Western researcher working and collaborating with colleagues in Ukraine. I want to do work that is needed and wanted by the communities and people I’m working with, rather than becoming an additional burden or imposing an external agenda on my partners.

So often the way I get into projects with colleagues in Ukraine is quite responsive. In this case, it started with an invitation from the Pokrovsk Historical Museum. They wanted to apply for a British Council grant, in collaboration with the Center for Urban History in Lviv, to work with the Mykola Bilokon archive at the Pokrovsk Museum. I had previously worked with the Center for Urban History on a project called (Un)archiving (Post)Industry, working with museums in eastern Ukraine before the full-scale invasion. We worked with the Pokrovsk Museum, the displaced Donetsk Museum in Kramatorsk, and the Mariupol Local History Museum. The team in Lviv, led by researcher Dr Iryna Sklokina, digitised many of their collections, and we worked with artists, curators, and communities to engage with these collections, unarchive them, and think about the different stories that could be told through them.

So we already had this relationship with Pokrovsk. After the museum was evacuated to Dnipro, its director, Anhelina Rozhkova, approached us about applying for the British Council grant. The idea was to put the Mykola Bilokon archive that we had digitised into dialogue with an archive from Scotland. That’s how the dialogue between Franki Raffles and Mykola Bilokon emerged. It became a longer research project, and I really wanted DCCC to be a partner and to have an opportunity to develop an exhibition. The first part was primarily a research project, with online seminars looking at the two archives, what was similar and what was different. As you saw, there’s this archival capsule within the exhibition that brings the two archives into dialogue.

Then, when Natasha came on board, the project expanded, bringing the archival material into dialogue with contemporary artworks. I think that was really the achievement of my co-curators: finding a way to bring all of these different elements together and create that balance.

Kateryna Rusetska: I would add that I’m also a representative of the institution, and I think that’s probably part of my role in our trio. At the beginning of the project, we were thinking on a smaller scale, perhaps starting with research and then developing an exhibition in the future. But quite quickly, Andrii (author’s note: Andrii Palash is the director of DCCC) and I realised how strong the project was, and then we had the opportunity to become one of the institutions participating in the Kyiv Biennial. We felt that this was a very good match for the project, and in the end, the exhibition became part of the Biennial.

In our case, the close relationship with the Pokrovsk Museum and the whole team was very important. We were able to communicate with them not only remotely but also meet them in person, and we’ve continued working together on other projects since then. So, for us, the exhibition also became part of a longer-term relationship and collaboration.

Natasha Chychasova: I joined the project upon the invitation of Andrii Palash. At first, I found it difficult to understand how we could bring the two archives of Franki Raffles and Mykola Bilokon together, as they come from very different contexts, positions, and photographic practices. It took us quite a long time, through many conversations with the whole team, to understand how to approach them.

Eventually, we realised that we needed to think more broadly about archival practices in times of war, and about what archives mean in this context. We wanted to illuminate their fragility: something that can seem so solid from a Western-European perspective, an archive holding knowledge, memories, and histories, can become extremely vulnerable and an easy target during war. At the same time, personal memory is deeply connected to the practice of archiving. For us as a curatorial team, it was important to emphasise that we were not trying to remain distant from the subject, and that the most honest way to work with these archives was through personal stories and connections. It was also important not to present the Ukrainian experience as a universal one, but as one experience within a broader history of war and conflict. That’s why we invited artists such as Selma Selman, Tako Taal and Adrian Pepe, whose works approach questions of memory, history, and archives from very different perspectives.

“An archive holding knowledge, memories, and histories, can become extremely vulnerable and an easy target during war.”

Only part of the exhibition deals directly with archival material. Other works approach the idea of the archive more indirectly, showing that an archive is not simply a place where documents are stored. It can be something much more alive and dynamic. For me, it was especially important to show the work of the Pokrovsk Museum team: how they care for and work with archival materials, and how personal memory can activate an archive and make it feel alive rather than static or distant.

N. C.: It’s really nice to hear how the exhibition resonated with you. What you ask is also a huge part of Victoria and Iryna Sklokina’s work (author’s note: Iryna Sklokina, historian and researcher, authored texts for the exhibition), so perhaps Victoria can say more about the archival wall, as we call it.

V. D.: I think we tried to draw the themes from the research itself, from what was coming up in the conversations between the people who had worked with both archives. Dr Catherine Spencer, who is the co-curator for the Scotland exhibition, and Dr Alistair Scott at Edinburgh Napier University, worked most closely with the Franki Raffles archive at St Andrews. Their work and the work of their PhD students has been really important in bringing Raffles to greater visibility in the UK, where feminist photographers have not been particularly visible in the history of documentary photography.

Catherine (author’s note: Catherine Spencer is the co-curator of the exhibition in Dundee), Alistair, Iryna, and other colleagues were part of the research conversations we had before the exhibition, and we tried to identify some of the key topics that were coming up and use them as a structuring device for the archival wall. I also think that our shared interests and politics informed the selection. Feminist curation engages not only with questions of politics and power, but also with human relationships, care, and our own positionality.

I’m a mother of a daughter who is Anna’s age, and the relationship between Anna and Franki really resonated with me. I was thinking about how I take my daughter on research trips, and how that can be both challenging and rewarding. That was something I wanted to highlight because it’s not necessarily a story you would tell from this archive. But sometimes things resonate strongly with you because of your positionality as a curator and as a person just operating in the world, as well as the political questions you want to ask.

I think you’re definitely right that we were trying to avoid a binary opposition between Bilokon and Raffles as outsider and insider. We wanted to avoid that sharp binary and bring out some of the complexity. It was also really helpful to have Iryna Sklokina involved from the Centre for Urban History in Lviv; she is an incredibly knowledgeable and critical researcher and brought out some of the more complex and difficult questions around Bilokon’s archive. While he was an insider, from Pokrovsk and working there to document the city, there are also questions about his privileged access to different spaces and communities and the consent of his subjects.

We had a long conversation about whether to include the photographs Bilokon made at the maternity hospital in Pokrovsk, because there was a question about whether the women had formally consented to the images. Some of them were very intimate, and we decided not to include them in the end. But the same questions about the politics and ethics of documentary photography can be asked of both archives; the power that the photographer has to objectify, create stereotypes, or produce a particular vision of a place or its people. It’s not simply West versus East; these are questions about documentary photography itself.

At the same time, we wanted to hold on to the differences between the two archives; what it means to work from different political points of view and different positionalities, as a feminist photographer from the UK and as a photographer working for a Soviet-era newspaper in eastern Ukraine. It was difficult to hold all of that complexity without overburdening the viewer with too much text. Sasha Burlaka’s design was really helpful (author’s note: Sasha Burlaka, architect, made exhibition design). If you wanted simply to engage with the images, you could, but if you wanted to go deeper into the text, you could do that too.

N. C.: For me, the main idea was not to simply compare these two experiences, but to use the archival wall as a starting point for the whole project. It began with the research, and the wall brings together many of the topics that we wanted to explore throughout the exhibition. One of these topics is landscape, which can also be understood as something political. Yana Kononova’s work was a particularly strong match for this theme because it speaks directly to these questions.

In the context of Bilokon, it was also important for me to show that he was a newspaper photographer. He worked with an editor who gave him specific assignments, and he knew the person writing the article for which he was making the images. So the photographs were not created independently, but as part of a larger editorial project for the newspaper. This makes the Bilokon archive more complex and allows us to think about the different contexts in which his photographs were produced.

N. C.: We showed materials from both his private archive and his work as a photojournalist, mixing them to show the difference between the more ideological newspaper images and his personal archive. At the same time, we wanted to show him not simply as an instrument of the newspaper, but as a photojournalist with power to influence the lives of the people he photographed. For me, it opened up a more complex story about him and blurred the boundaries between private and public archives.

V. D.: I think one of the really beautiful things about working across academic and artistic research is that academic research often wants to make quite definite conclusions about things, to say, “It was like this,” and tell a story in rather categorical terms. Artistic research can destabilise that and point to the potential arbitrariness of the ways in which academic research reaches those conclusions.

“Artistic research can destabilise and point to the potential arbitrariness of the ways in which academic research reaches conclusions.”

I really liked that Katya Buchatska and Clemens Poole were present in these academic discussions. Clemens, in particular, offered a strong critique of this kind of academic certainty around the archive. His work is like a whisper network, where gossip about Franki Raffles is constantly changing and being exchanged between people. To me it seems in part a critique of the way academic research constructs stories about the past through selective interpretations. Katya’s work does something similar. She creates a new visual narrative by combining the two archives, while also pointing out how arbitrary that combination is. In her participatory work, we wanted visitors to feel invited to print other images from the archive and create their own stories. So the work highlights the fact that what we present is always a selective representation, and that many different stories can be told from the same archives.

N. C.: It’s important to add that Katya Buchatska’s work uses not only images from these two archives, but also her own archive from Pokrovsk. For me, this is a beautiful metaphor for the whole project, because I don’t feel that we are completely distant from this material. We’ve talked a lot about our personal connections with Pokrovsk, although we have very different experiences of the city. For example, Victoria has visited it, while I have never been there.

We didn’t want to find one universal method of working with the archive, but rather to show different approaches, sometimes speculative, sometimes very direct, to images, personal stories, and memory. That’s also why it was important to represent the colleagues from the Pokrovsk Museum not simply as our partners, but as real participants in the exhibition.

When working with people who have lost their homes, personal archives, and photographs, we were very conscious of not crossing the line into retraumatisation. At the same time, I think it was important for the museum workers to tell their stories, and for the Pokrovsk community and people displaced from Donetsk and Luhansk regions to see things they could recognise and talk about their own experiences.

The distance from these places is not only psychological; it is physical. Many people simply cannot return to their cities. So we were also thinking about how to work with memories and with archives that are no longer physical, but can be reconstructed through oral stories and fragments of surviving material.

Kateryna Rusetska: Definitely! I think it’s important for the Pokrovsk community, and not only, just to feel that it’s not forgotten, that we speak about these stories, that we ask questions, and that other people are also curious.

And we then had a workshop with Adrian Pepe, who worked with patterns from the textile factory in Pokrovsk. He did a workshop with around ten people, and most of these people were those who had lost their homes. One of the tasks was to bring some clothes, or maybe a piece of textile, that means something to them and that they were ready to have transformed into something else, to give it a kind of new life.

And most of the people brought not just some random textile or clothes, but something that was also an archive of their previous life, something they had a connection to. For example, Anhelina brought a beautiful, lightweight chiffon dress. She had been wearing it during the hurried evacuation from Pokrovsk. What was the story, I don’t remember?

V. D.: I remember the story. She said that she went back to her house after it had been struck by a missile, and she was getting the clothes that were still okay from the wardrobe. She took this dress because it looked like it hadn’t been damaged, but when she wore it, there was a piece of shrapnel in it, and it scratched her leg.

K. R.: So basically she brought a thing which is kind of evidence of crime and war, but also very connected to her personally. Everyone who participated in this project brought something that was really meaningful to them. There were also women from Sievierodonetsk, and one of them brought a blouse, I think, about 40 years old. It was a blouse she had worn on her first date with her husband, which took place in Sievierodonetsk.

And I think what is really amazing is the trust they placed in us. They trusted Adrian, an artist from Lebanon, to work with them and to talk about their personal stories, stories from perhaps 40 years ago, or from just two years ago.

N. C.: We had a broad discussion about what kind of artists we wanted to show. We were interested in artists whose practices relate to archives, personal stories, and memories of war, especially at a time when family archives and other things that connect us to the past can disappear. Sometimes the only thing we have left is our own memory, which is also constantly being transformed.

“When you no longer have direct access to a place, archives can become a source of knowledge about what that place was.”

For example, Elias Parvulesco worked directly with the Bilokon archive during his residency in Pokrovsk in 2019. In his film, he combines images from Bilokon’s archive with images of the city. For me, this raises an important issue about archival material: when you no longer have direct access to a place, archives can become a source of knowledge about what that place was, especially when it has changed so dramatically.

Pokrovsk has almost disappeared as the place it once was, and it can never simply return to what it was before the full-scale invasion. So these archival materials become evidence of the existence of these places and the lives that once existed there. They allow us not only to compare what a place was with what it has become, but, in a way, to make that place present again; not simply as a ghost, but as something filled with memories, personal connections, and stories.

Another very important work for me is Selma Selman’s You Have No Idea, which ends the exhibition. It complicates the idea of solidarity. We want to believe in a future where we can all live in solidarity with the experiences of others, but we are also constantly confronted with the limits of our ability to understand those experiences. So the work raises a difficult question: can we ever really build a world in which all experiences are included and we are in solidarity with everyone? I like that the exhibition doesn’t try to provide an idealised answer, but instead leaves us with this difficult question.

V. D.: I can say a little bit about the title. Everything for Everybody is taken from a business card that we found in the Franki Raffles archive. Raffles travelled around the Soviet Union using the Intourist travel agency and, of course, moved through networks that had already been created for her by the hosting institution. So she was seeing a particular, curated version of reality. One of the organisations she used was a newly established enterprise that provided services for foreign tourists – a firm called Everything for Everybody [Vse dlia vsykh, in Russian]. It was a fascinating object in the archive because it reflects the new post-socialist neoliberal order that was emerging around 1989, as private enterprises were beginning to appear. Its bureaucratic name and its promise of providing “everything for everybody” seemed to capture this approaching idea of a world in which everything would become available to everybody.

Both archives document this moment of transformation. Raffles was photographing in 1989, while Mykola Bilokon was also photographing through the collapse of the Soviet Union, including the emergence of private enterprises. So you see both transformation and continuity: things changing, but also things that remain the same.

The phrase also resonated with the broader themes of the exhibition, particularly the complicated politics of solidarity that Natasha was talking about. Raffles was trying to create transnational feminist solidarities between people living in very different political contexts, but there were also risks in that. For example, of overly idealising the Soviet Union or simplifying the experience of gendered labour there. We see another form of solidarity in Adrian Pepe’s workshops, where people in Beirut and Dnipro brought emotionally significant textiles and worked with the Pokrovsk archival pattern. And Selma Selman’s work also questions the possibility of fully understanding and being in solidarity with other people’s experiences.

“Every time you create an archive, you also leave something out.”

Finally, there is the literal question of archiving. At a time when archives and heritage are being lost through war, new grassroots and informal archival practices are emerging. But every time you create an archive, you also leave something out. So whose stories are being preserved, and whose are left out?

In that sense, the title also asks whether creating new archives is really a way of preserving “everything for everybody,” or whether we are inevitably creating another selective version of cultural memory and history.

K. R.: I think something new also started to appear in me while we were working on this exhibition and communicating with the people from Pokrovsk. I started to feel more strongly that you can also lose your own space, your own places and memories. When I came back to Dnipro after being away for almost half a year, I noticed this feeling of potential loss much more strongly. Victoria was also visiting Dnipro, and we went to Zaporizhzhia, where the proximity to the frontline makes this feeling even more intense. I found myself wanting to photograph everything I could; not military objects, of course, but the places and things around me. It became a kind of personal archive, which also connects to Katya Buchatska’s work.

“Something I had photographed only a week earlier had already become part of my archive.”

While we were in Zaporizhzhia, we happened to meet some friends who are serving there. They took us to a beautiful Palace of Culture with a view towards Khortytsia. There was an amazing bas-relief, and we all took photographs of it. A week later, it was completely destroyed. When I saw the news, I went back through the photographs on my phone. I felt almost happy that I had seen it and had the chance to photograph it, but also heartbroken that something I had photographed only a week earlier had already become part of my archive. It made me realise how quickly something can move from the present into the archive.

This also changed the way I think about places like Pokrovsk. When we talk to the museum team, there can be a tendency to romanticise a city that is disappearing. I’ve been to Pokrovsk many times, and my perception of places is very different from Angelina Rozhkova, for example, because for her they are connected to childhood and to the stories of her life.

So I think the exhibition is also about this difference between seeing a place and remembering a place, and about how those memories are being created and transformed right now, rather than simply belonging to the past.

Kateryna Rusetska: Obviously, the winter was harsh, and we had to cancel half of the public programme because we simply couldn’t make it happen. It was two degrees in the space, there was no electricity. All these practical challenges that we sometimes forget about because they’re just part of what we deal with.

But I think it’s important to mention this for an international audience. We all organise exhibitions and public programmes, but we also need to ask: under what conditions? I remember that during the installation there was a blackout. I have this beautiful photograph of Adrian sitting on the floor, pinning a pattern from the archive with a torch above him. It’s such a theatrical image, but it also captures the reality of making the exhibition at that moment.

I remember thinking that it was quite fitting to have an artist from Beirut there, because he was completely unfazed by the conditions. He was like, “No, it’s fine. I’ll just carry on working in the dark.” He told us they sometimes have eight-hour blackouts in Beirut, so a late night without electricity was nothing unusual for him.

And I think that’s also something worth remembering when we talk about this exhibition internationally: the exhibition was made not despite these conditions, but within them. They were part of the reality of making it.