The Fritt Ord Foundation and the Open Society Foundations cordially invite you to a one-day event on 5 December 2022, titled Ukraine’s Creative Resistance: Culture, Art and Expression in Wartime. The event will bring together Ukrainian authors, journalists, photographers, documentary filmmakers, cultural curators, musicians, and civil society actors. We will experience and understand Ukrainian culture and through panel discussions examine the role artistic creation – through both words and images – has played in Ukrainian resilience. We will hear from artists who are creating in wartime about how their artistic vision and identity as Ukrainian artists have shifted since Russia’s brutal invasion, and from writers and journalists about finding the language to speak to their audiences in wartime and how their work will contribute to the documentation of war crimes. We will explore the more global questions of whether there is room for art among the brutality of war, and whether art is actually a critical part of healing and resistance.

Join us for the screening of short films and discussion is dedicated to raising awareness to the city of Mariupol. Russian troops surrounded the Ukrainian port city in the first days of the full-scale war and have been besieging it for three months. The city is now largely destroyed; many residential buildings are no longer habitable. Now the city is occupied.

The Fritt Ord Foundation and Open Society Foundations invite you to a one-day event on 6 December 2022, titled War, Memory, Identity: A Global Dialogue. Through panel discussions and conversations with artists, historians, human rights activists and media professionals, we will examine questions of exile, colonialism, memory, and collaboration across lines of war. This event follows a one-day event on Ukrainian culture and its role in shaping Ukraine’s awe-inspiring resistance in the face of Russian brutality and aggression.