Ukraine. A Different Angle on Neighbourhood

The album features 75 works by 57 Polish and Ukrainian artists from the 17th century to the present, all dedicated to Ukraine.

It presents Ukraine as seen by both Polish realist painters and Ukrainian artists: icons, photographs, paintings, costumes. On the one hand, it tells of the building of Ukrainian statehood and identity, the awe of its nature, and on the other hand – of its poverty and political oppression. Thanks to the perspectives of the two nations, the Ukrainian identity myth of Cossacks turns out to be related to the Polish myth of the uprising, the symbolism of the Ukrainian hut is connected to the Polish manor, Cossacks and Sarmatians from eighteenth-century coffin portraits look at each other as in mirrors, and the myth of the black earth is collated with modern projects of the R.E.P. collective. In the exhibition, the presented reproductions of works are provided with curatorial texts by Oksana Barshynova and Żanna Komar, as well as essays by Anna Łazar and Mykola Riabchuk.

The album accompanied the exhibition "Ukraine. A Different Angle on Neighbourhood," co-organized by the ICC and NAMU, the largest art museum in Kyiv, which ended just weeks before Russia's aggression against Ukraine.

Trilingual edition: Polish, Ukrainian, English.

The publication was issued as part of the project titled “Inny Kraków”, co-financed by the City of Krakow.

The book can be purchased at the ICC online bookstore.