Vira Karpinska: Documentary cinema and DOCU/CLUB in Ukraine during war
Thursday 17 April 2025
Vira Karpinska, a member of the DOCU/CLUB initiative in Ukraine, spoke about the role of making and watching documentaries in precarious times and spaces, the role of cinema in community developments, and the challenges and aspirations of independent documentary movements in Ukraine.
Discussion and dispatches moderated by Dr Jeffrey Murer of the Centre for Arts and Politics and Viktoriia Grivina, a St Andrews PhD student and author from the Quiet Centre residency. The aim of the dispatches was to open a window, a time-and-space portal between St Andrews and Kharkiv, pondering the connections, policies of knowledge production, and communities of the places.
Russian Forces Strik Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Site
On 1 March 2022 Russian forces struck the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Centre in a missile attack. The BYHMC, built on Europe’s largest mass grave of the Holocaust, recently unveiled “The Crystal Wall of Crying” by Marina Abramović on 8 October 2021, to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the mass atrocity when Nazi forces murdered the entirety of Kyiv’s Jewish population, some 33,000 people, between 29 and 30 September 1941. The unveiling ceremony of the “Crystal Wall of Crying”, which was one of the largest art objects built in Europe in the last decade, was attended by the Presidents of Ukraine, Germany, and Israel. Testimony given at the Nuremburg Trials following the Second World war documented how further Jews, Roma, Ukrainians, and Prisoners of War were brought to Babyn Yar to be executed, suggesting that more than 100,000 people were murdered there. More recent studies suggest that that number could be as high as 200,000.