Generator Projects, Takeover exhibition, Dundee, 25/26 Mid Wynd Industrial Estate, Dundee, DD1 4JG
10–25 September 2026, open Wednesday-Sundays, 12.00-17:00
As Achille Mbembe reminds us, the archive is no neutral repository of memory. Through the politics of selection and deselection, archives assert a hierarchy of cultural value. Decisions are made about what is worthy of cultural note – and therefore preservation – and what gets discarded as historical trash. While we may search for answers in the archive, the truth is that it holds only a very partial record of the past, shaped by the priorities and prejudices, the fetishes and fantasies, of those who came before. Yet, if archiving can be a tool of exclusion, in other hands it can be liberatory. Outside of institutions, community-driven archival practices can resist erasure, asserting cultural presence and belonging. At times of war and crisis, this work becomes more urgent. As archives are occupied, displaced and deliberately destroyed, communities have mobilized to document vulnerable realities. In this transformed archival landscape, much is lost but something vital is also gained. The singular authority of the archive gives way to multiplicity, creating space for different kinds of history-making to emerge.
Everything for Everybody takes as its point of departure two archives from the UK and Ukraine brought together through a British Council project: the Franki Raffles Photography Collection at the University of St Andrews and the Mykola Bilokon photographic archives held by the Pokrovsk Historical Museum. The practices of Raffles and Bilokon revolved around the communities to which they felt connected. Despite the distances that separated them in space and context, their work shared common interests in documenting working-class life, gendered labour, and the shifting political landscape at the end of socialism. In 1989, Edinburgh-based Raffles visited the Soviet Union (including the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic) with her young daughter, to establish links between the struggles of working women in Scotland and the USSR, where she photographed women labourers in factories, hospitals, construction sites, and fields. These images became her ‘Soviet Women’ series, which reflects on the leftist dream of the ideal and emancipated socialist subject, while revealing the double burden of women’s work. This pursuit of the ideal can also be seen in Bilokon’s photographs of heroized workers in enterprises and collective farms. Produced while a correspondent for Pokrovsk’s (then Krasnoarmiisk’s) local newspaper Maiak (Lighthouse), Bilokon’s work comparably resonates with the shifting political landscape of the time.
These collections invite further reflection: How do archives come into being? Who has access to their contents and who controls their meaning? What is the role of an archive during wartime? How do archives form unique testimonies of places that have vanished or been destroyed? The backdrop to these questions is the reality of war, in which the Pokrovsk Historical Museum — which held Bilokon’s legacy — was evacuated. The city itself is now fully occupied by the Russian army. In this context, the exhibition’s title ‘Everything for Everybody’ – a phrase taken from Raffles’s archive – reads both as a promise and a provocation: whose stories are we archiving now, and for whom? Rather than offering definitive answers, this exhibition aims to open a space in which diverse artistic practices exploring archival materials, family histories, and documentary practice can intersect. In fostering this dialogue, we have found it important to look beyond Ukraine’s borders to other contexts and geographies dealing with loss, the remnants of colonial pasts, and violent legacies. What new archives of solidarity can we build now, and what obstacles exist to their construction?
Exhibition participants: Katya Buchatska, Sophia Gera and Kamila Yanar, Lia Dostlieva, Ola Yeriemieieva, Olesia Kashyvska, Yana Kononova, Tetiana Kostiuchenko, Elias Parvulesco, Adrian Pepe, Clemens Poole, Anhelina Rozhkova, Selma Selman, Tako Taal, Valeriia Fedorenko
Curatorial group: Natasha Chychasova, Victoria Donovan, Catherine Spencer, Kateryna Rusetska
Project consultants: Laura Brown; Jessica Gerschultz, Tetiana Kostiuchenko, Anhelina Rozhkova, Iryna Sklokina, Alistair Scott
Authors of texts on Mykola Bilokon and Franki Raffles: Iryna Sklokina, Victoria Donovan, and Catherine Spencer
Project Coordination: Andrii Palash, Kyla Ylanan
Exhibition architecture: Oleksandr Burlaka
Technical support: Oleksii Drubych, Olena Misiura
Design and layout: Mila Kostiana
Translation: Anastasiia Garazd, Yuliia Kulish, Anna Lordan, Anna Tasheva
Supported by: Department of Culture, Tourism and Cultural Heritage Preservation at the Pokrovsk City Council in Donetsk region; Pokrovsk Historical Museum; NGO ‘Pokrovsk Cultural Code +’; Center for Urban History of East Central Europe; Dnipro Center for Contemporary Culture; ERSTE Foundation; The New Democracy Fund; Danish Cultural Institute; Sigrid Rausing Trust; British Council Ukraine; British Council Scotland; Centre for Global (Post)socialisms, Centre for Contemporary Art, and Center for Art and Politics at the University of St Andrews; University of St Andrews Impact and Innovation Fund.
The exhibition forms part of the research project ‘The Worker Portrait in the Twentieth Century: Archives and Artistic Reflection’, supported by the British Council’s ‘Support for Cultural Activity in Ukraine with UK Involvement’ programme.