an exhibition of award-winning photographs and video by Evgeniy Maloletka and Mstyslav Chernov (AP) from the first days Russia invaded Ukraine 2022
November 9-20, 2022 – Wed – Sun 11-6
at the Howl! Arts New York
250 Bowery, 2nd fl, New York
press release | info on show + bios
photos | photos of related events
Events:
Saturday, November 12 from 4:00 to 7:00 PM
Reception with the artists photos
Sunday, November 20 at 5:00 PM
“Music and Spoken Word for Mariupol”
created by Yara Arts Group with poet Bob Holman and bandura master Julian Kytasty, with Yara Artists and Daria Kolomiec.
Donations will go to RAZOM for Ukraine, a Ukrainian-American non-profit organization that provides medical and humanitarian aid.
There were no funerals. No memorials. No public gatherings to mourn those killed by Russia’s relentless attacks on the port city of Mariupol that became a symbol of Ukraine’s ferocious resistance. The mass grave trenches told the story of a city under siege.
The world would have seen none of this, would have seen next to nothing at all from Mariupol as a city under siege, if it wasn’t for Mstyslav Chernov and Evgeniy Maloletka, the Associated Press team who race into the city when the invasion began and stayed long after it had become one of the most dangerous places on Earth. For more than two weeks, they were the only international media in the city, and the only journalists able to transmit video and still photos to the outside world.
According to Mstyslav Chernov, on 11 March they were taking photos in a hospital in Mariupol when they were taken out of the city with the assistance of Ukrainian soldiers. They managed to escape from Mariupol unharmed. The documented devastation in Mariupol was described in Chernov’s AP article “20 Days in Mariupol: The Team that Documented the City’s Agony” (March 22, 2022, AP). Mstyslav Chernov, Evgeniy Maloletka and Vasilisa Stepanenko received the Knight International Journalism Award for their work in Mariupol from the International Center for Journalists.
Moscow hated their work. The Russian embassy in London tweeted images of AP photos with the word “Fake” over them in red text. A top Russian diplomat held up copies of photos from the maternity hospital at a U.N. Safety Council meeting, insisting they were phony. But their photographs and the people who they met speak to what happened in Mariupol.