Exhibition ‘No Other Home: The Crimean Tatars Repatriates’ opens in Kyiv
Exhibition of documentary photographs titled “No Other Home: The Crimean Tatars Repatriates” has been opened at the Ivan Honchar Museum (Kyiv) on June 7. The exhibition will run until July 10. Multimedia exhibition presents documentary photographs by the two American women – professional photographer Alison Cartwright and sound installation by ethnic musicologist at Columbia University Maria Sonevytsky (New York). The exhibition is a photographic and ethnographic exploration of the indigenous people of the Crimean peninsula conveyed by means of archival audio materials. In May of 2008, Maria Sonevytsky and Alison Cartwright traveled throughout Crimea – the scenic peninsula jutting out from southern Ukraine into the Black Sea – gathering stories and songs that told of the Crimean Tatars' decades-long struggle to return to their motherland. Forcibly relocated by Stalin in 1944, the Tatars began to return to Crimea only in the last twenty years. The stories of the twenty-six families interviewed for this exhibit reveal how the memory of exile and uncertain prospects for the future manifest in their daily lives determine what "home" is for these people who have for so long lived without it. Discussions over endless rounds of strong Turkish coffee in villages and cities throughout Crimea, now an autonomous republic under Ukrainian jurisdiction, inevitably led to this lament, which was repeated in a multitude of variations: "We are Crimean Tatars; we have nowhere else to go." It became almost an improvised incantation, a worn cultural narrative demonstrating the potency of an inherited place in the world. One can hear the same refrain in the idyllic village hills of Ay Sere…"We are Crimean Tatars; we have nowhere else to go." Thus, the two American cultural figures managed to collect a rich material about the life of the Crimean Tatar people and now present it to residents and visitors of Ukraine. The visitors of the exhibition can see modern portraits, family photos, farms and landscapes, children, youth and the elderly in their own modest homes and in yards. The focus is made on the buildings as universal symbols of home, personification of sacred space and, at the same time, the components of personal and ethnic identity. The authors of the project emphasize all this through the effective use of visual contrasts, for instance, between the appearance and interiors of houses, scenic beauty and obstruction of the infrastructure as a consequence of two decades of repatriation, which took place during the economic and political instability after the proclamation of Ukraine’s independence. Exhibition “No Other Home…” is a vivid example of the modern interpretation when the history of the peoples is depicted through live scenes of dramatic destinies, testimonies and stories of individuals. In May 2010, the project was presented in the Ukrainian Museum in New York City, as well as in the online edition Triple Canopy (in English) and the Pressje magazine (in Polish). This year, the multimedia exhibition arrived in Kyiv at the invitation of the Ivan Honchar Museum with the support of the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine and Aerosvit Airlines. “We have pictures, but there are also audio recordings. Sound recordings show that one can hear through the old phones that we have reprogrammed by digital technologies,” the organizer of the exhibition Maria Sonevytsky noted.
The exposition features more than 300 photographs of 26 Crimean Tatar families. Stunning photos by Alison Cartwright show the beauty and vulnerability of repatriates’ life in the modern Crimea.
