Ukraine’s freedom path captured by eleven photographers

Should the National Monument Camp Vught, which commemorates the horrors of the Second World War in the former Nazi prison camp, also venture into the topicality of the war in Ukraine? Isn’t remembering the Holocaust enough – should it also burden the already troubled visitor with the bleak present? Director Jeroen van den Eijnde is firm about the decision to open the photo exhibition Ukraine, the path to freedom to offer shelter in his museum. ‘It speaks for itself. Our motto is: to remember is to think. The terrible things that happened in the Second World War are still socially relevant.’

After visiting the execution site in the Brabantse Bos, the barracks for prisoners and Jews and the crematorium, and after viewing the artifacts that remind of camp life under the Nazis, visitors to the former Camp Vught now enter the exhibition of contemporary horror in Mariupol, Azov, Luhansk, Kyiv and Bocha. And Van den Eijnde is right: the logic is unmistakable.

Van den Eijnde sees numerous similarities between the Nazi era and the present in the work of eleven Ukrainian photographers and a videographer that is shown. ‘The human rights violations, the killing of civilians, the suppression of freedom and the denial of sovereignty: human values ​​are being violated, and we want to show that here.’ If the appearance of a crematorium or barbed wire in the former camp is still more or less abstract, ‘these photos make it concrete’.

There are indeed some gruesome photographs from the war zone, although the most confronting are not exhibited to somewhat spare youthful visitors (whose parents are warned at the entrance). However, the largest part of the exhibition is not devoted to the war year 2022, but, as the title already reflects, to the many years that Ukraine has been trying to free itself from the yoke of Moscow. Starting with the 1970s, with colorfully painted black-and-white photographs by Evgeniy Pavlov, kindred spirit, style and compatriot of Boris Mikhailov: work that unmistakably, but for the censor elusive, pokes fun at Soviet oppression.

The series is moving, touching and yet also a bit comical passport by Alexander Chekmenev. After Ukraine broke away from the Soviet Union in 1991, all residents had to purchase a new passport, and therefore a passport photo. Old citizens who could not make it to the photo studio were visited at home. They pose for the photographer in their own living room, against the required white background, a sheet of cardboard. But Chekmenev also shows everything around this frame of the passport photo: beautiful, the weathered, frightened-looking elderly in their traditional interior of tapestries, antique wallpaper and steel beds, posing for long journeys that they will probably never make again.

Of course, much attention is paid to the Maidan revolution that marked the final break between Moscow and Kyiv: less for the massiveness of the demonstrations around the capital’s central square, but above all for the individual courage and suffering of the citizens. The upheaval of 2014/15 has boosted youth culture, but also marks the constant threat of Russian aggression against the sovereign nation. The invasion of February 2022 is, as you can clearly feel here, not the start of the war, but the large-scale sequel to it.

A twenty-minute video film gives a layered picture of youth culture, of the aggression that the LGBTI community has to fear from extreme right-wing thugs. From graffiti artists who enrich the city with poetic slogans. Of the violence of war that rumbles like thunder just outside Luhansk and Kramatorsk, with the occasional lightning strike from a fired grenade close by.

A painfully beautiful series about the consequences of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986 (a snowy birch forest with a sign warning against radioactivity); an ode to the grandmothers of Ukraine by Elena Subach (whose work was previously featured in Volkskrant magazine) and an unparalleled strong and staggering, sometimes macabre selection of images from the war year 2022 by AP photographer Mstyslav Chernov give the exhibition, in all its sadness, a multifaceted, sometimes sacred character. Earlier, at the end of 2022, the photos were shown in the Akerk in Groningen. The Vught successor is more compact (29 photographers were represented in Groningen). And, certainly on that historically charged site of the former camp, deeply impressive.