The Greenwich+Docklands International Festival annually gathers more than 80,000 visitors in the open air, combining theater, dance, music, circus performances and art installations. This year, Ukraine was represented at the GDIF with the project “Discover Ukraine: Bit by Bit”.
Discover Ukraine: Bits Destroyed at the Greenwich+Docklands International Festival
The Greenwich+Docklands International Festival annually gathers more than 80,000 visitors in the open air, combining theater, dance, music, circus performances and art installations. This year, Ukraine was represented at the GDIF with the project “Discover Ukraine: Bit by Bit”.
Originally created in 2019, the audio-visual event “Discover Ukraine: Bit by Bit” has been reimagined. The project presented images of 56 monumental mosaics from the 1960 — 70s. More than a quarter have been damaged or destroyed since the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine.
With musical accompaniment by the duo Ptakh_Jung, monumental mosaics were projected onto the façade of the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich, part of the UNESCO world heritage site.
On the last day of the event, the lecture “Between Two Fires: Monumental Art in Ukraine” (in English) was held by art historian and curator Lizaveta Herman together with photographer and monumental art researcher Yevhen Nikiforov. They talked about the monumental heritage of Ukraine in the 1960s and 1980s: its history, disputable status in contemporary culture, challenges of research and protection, and threats of disappearance under Russian shelling.