Odesa Photo Days 2021

The only international festival of contemporary photography in Ukraine, Odesa Photo Days, will take place in Odesa for the 7th time. After an emergency and successful transition to the online format in 2020, the event comes back offline with the theme "Breaking the Wall". In three days there will be 10 events: opening and closing of exhibitions, evening photo screenings, presentations of photo projects.

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"With the pandemic, a new type of ‘the fourth wall’ has separated us from each other: screens of various gadgets have made it difficult to experience human communication physically. What does this line divide now?" — says the official concept. Read the full text of the concept on the festival website.

The official opening will take place in the frame of the main exhibition "Who Is Next To You?" in the Museum of Odesa Modern Art. The series forming this exhibition were selected a year ago based on the results of the international open call “Who Is Next To You?”

An international jury selected ten series which visualize stories from different continents about people who are near and far at the same time. These are stories from forgotten archives and the lives of immigrants, neighbour kids, watermelon sellers on the highway, etc.; stories embodied in things and found objects, portraits, collages and old family photos.

A year passed, and the questions that bothered us then are even more acute now. Today the question "Who is next to you?" acquired additional anxiety: we became afraid of physical proximity even more than before the pandemic, which deepened the gap between people that already exists.

An evening screening of female photographers from Ukraine and Great Britain will be shown on the big screen in the courtyard of the MoOMA. The evening photo screening takes place as a part of the UA / UK Moving Image project, which is supported by the European Union under the House of Europe program. Joint project with the Bristol Photo Festival.

A special item of the program is the curatorial project of Kateryna Radchenko "Tectonic Shift". The international exhibition will be shown in the "Monster’s Castle" — a historic estate of the early twentieth century, which is now operated by the charity fund. Tectonic Shift site-specific project is an exhibition and research of social and political transformation in the countries of the former Eastern Bloc that happened or became relevant in 2020. Artists: Rafal Milach (Poland), Shailo Djekshenbaev (Kyrgyzstan), Sergiy Shabohin (Belarus), Gohar Sargsyan (Armenia), Piruza Khalapyan (Armenia).

On May 22, with the support of the Embassy of the Republic of Lithuania in Ukraine, the curatorial project of Darius Vaicekauskas — an exhibition of contemporary Lithuanian photography “Lost Time” will open at the Invogue Art Gallery.

The project explores contemporary photography, post-photography and the various ways in which images are manipulated by artists to fill photography with relevant meanings and interpretations. In the group exhibition you can see the works of Aurelija Maknyte, Dovile Dagiene, Darius Vaicekauskas, Juozapas Kalnius, Vytautas Kumza, Valentyn Odnoviun, Ieva Rute.

Together with the Bavarian House Odesa and with the support of the Goethe-Institut in Ukraine, the international festival of contemporary photography Odesa Photo Days 2021 will hold an evening screening of German photography. To show the variety of styles, authorial approaches and themes in which photographers work, we invited three institutions: LUMIX Festival for Young Photojournalism, The German Youth Photo Award, Galerie Lichtblick. For the second time within the framework of the festival, the event will take place in the Passage Gallery — an outstanding architectural landmark of Odesa, built in 1898-1899. Live musical accompaniment by Anastasia Boychenko.

During Odesa Photo Days 2021 we will traditionally present a final selection of this year's competition for Ukrainian teenagers Future Photo Days at one of the screenings. As well as curatorial selections from different international partners. This year we are discovering photography in new countries through partnerships with the following institutions: Centro de Fotografía de Montevideo (CdF), Verzasca Foto Festival, The Budapest Photo Festival, New Irish Works by PhotoIreland.

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About the festival

Odesa Photo Days is an international festival and an educational platform dedicated to contemporary photography. Since 2015, the festival has been held annually in April in Odesa, Ukraine. The programme includes exhibitions, evening photo screenings, artist and curator talks, the Portfolio Review and the Open Mic presentation of photo projects.

In-between festival editions, the Odesa Photo Days team produces exhibition projects and educational activities both in Ukraine and abroad. The main goal of Odesa Photo Days is to popularize Ukrainian photography in the world and to encourage international collaboration between artists, curators, and cultural institutions.

In recent years, the festival team, led by curator Kateryna Radchenko, has organized more than 24 international exhibitions in Ukraine, showed works of Ukrainian photographers in 12 countries and participated in dozens of photographic events in both Europe and Asia.