Photo exhibition Destroyed granary of the world / Vladimír Hostinský – foyer of the Municipal House

“When we collected material for the exhibition in the spring of 2023, we visited places from the vicinity of Kyiv to villages in the east of Ukraine, a few kilometers from the front line. The war raged around Kiev more than a year before our trip. The photos here show a desperate effort to restore war damage rather than the expected destruction. The sheet metal of the newly built buildings shines here. Businesses have resumed production and fields are being cleared and re-sown. On the other hand, in the vicinity of Izjum, where artillery fire from the nearby front can still be heard, the devastation is still fresh. Farms are in ruins, mines and destroyed equipment lie in the fields. People are taking the remains of their belongings to temporary homes, hoping for the front to move further east soon. Despite these differences, the same impression emerges from conversations with people across Ukraine. For them, the reoccupation of occupied territories and the subsequent "cleaning" of fields and estates have become just items on a to-do list that simply need to be completed." Vladimír Hostinský, author of photographs