Ukraine is under siege following a full-scale military invasion by Russia on 24 February 2022

November 4, at 6:00 PM, as part of Donbas Studies public programme, there is a dramatic reading and presentation of Yevgenia Belorusets’ visual-literary book Happy Landings in the waiting room of Podil Bus Station (Nyzhnii Val st, 15A). The book is released by IST Publishing this year. During the presentation, everyone may listen to some text fragments and get a feeling for its events.

The focus spot of the book is the stories of women, who perceive themselves as witnesses to their own lives and to a “bigger story” — the one which has forced them to set off on a journey, to be displaced, to alter their biography and often their perception of reality.

Plotlines are connected with the fantastical daydreams of these heroines developing against the background of traumatic events in Ukraine. The reader may uncover the impact of these events in fragments of conversation, life experiences and everyday situations.

The approach of combining the text with imagery is indicative for Yevgenia Belorusets’ artistic practice. Happy Landings is a place where photo-stories and text plotlines coexist, where they interweave as different forms of speech.

The artist’s interest is in the situations of those who found themselves on the periphery, a place from which it is not easy to appeal and is even harder to learn how to be heard out. Is everything, that the reader encounters in Happy Landings, insignificant, trifling, coincidental? Is this really the case?

The presentation and dramatic reading will take place as part of Found Voices, a project realised with the support of the German Ministry for Foreign Affairs. Kateryna Nosko (IST-Publishing) will leed the presentation of the book. During the event, the guests invited by the author and the publishing house will provide their comments on the  given plotlines.

Featuring actors Maria Bruni and Akmal Gurezov; featuring theatre director and playwright Dmitry Levytskyi (Kyiv); literary translator and editor of the book Tatiana Baskakovaya (Moscow); as a critic, Ukrainian philosopher-translator, cultural analyst and publicist Andrei Repa (Kyiv/Cherkassy); as an interpreter of the event, photographer, founder of a school of documentary photography Viktor Marushchenko (Kyiv); the role of the book’s author is played by artist and writer Yevgenia Belorusets.


Free entry
November 4, 6:00 PM
The waiting room of Podil Bus Station, across the street from the Zhytniy market
Nyzhnii Val st, 15A. Kyiv