VENUE: CENTRE FOR BRITISH PHOTOGRAPHY
Please join us for an evening viewing of our current exhibitions on landscape and the environment, followed by an online talk by British artist Mark Neville who has been living in Kyiv since 2020.
Neville will join us live from his home in Kyiv where he will talk about the connection between aid and art, his life and work in Ukraine, and show previously unpublished images from his latest project ‘Postcode Ukraine’. The talk will last 60 to 90 minutes including audience questions, please book in advance.
Neville sent 750 copies of his pre-war book 'Stop Tanks With Books' out to a target audience of diplomats, politicians, peace negotiators, the super-rich, celebrities, and NATO and EU members – everyone who had the power to influence and help galvanise Western support for Ukraine’s fight for independence. Neville wanted recipients of the book to recognise a version of themselves in these portraits of Ukrainians. Using the book and these peoples’ lived experience to provoke strong emotions, he aimed to encourage governments, the powerful, and the influential to commit to helping Ukraine before the war began. This project was Neville’s personal fight against Russian aggression.
Despite the war, Neville decided to stay in Kyiv and help his adopted home, setting up a charity that fuses his documentary work with humanitarian aid. As founder of ‘Postcode Ukraine’ Neville regularly embarks on aid missions to frontline towns, delivering medicine, food, and generators, while simultaneously documenting the process. Alongside the crucial necessity to deliver often lifesaving humanitarian aid, Neville recognises the equally essential need to make new, intelligent images to present in resonant contexts to compassion-fatigued Western audiences in order to help people re-engage with Ukraine. His images from Ukraine have been exhibited in solo shows both at the V&A museum and the Foreign Office in London. ‘Stop Tanks With Books’ was nominated for both the Aperture Photobook Award and the Arles Photobook Award 2022, and was named Art Newspaper’s art book of the year.