The Kule Folklore Centre, University of Alberta, in partnership with St. John's Cultural Centre, Edmonton, is proud to host the exhibit "Maidan: Through Patience To Hope". This exhibit will be featured in the hall of the Cultural Centre from February 11, 2015 to the first week of March 2015. It captures the protests and changes in Ukraine that occurred last winter on the Maidan; bringing life to the quotes and feelings of the people who experienced this event.
This exhibit was originally displayed at the Rimini Meeting Festival in Italy during the summer of 2014. UofA Ukrainian Folklore graduate student Natalia Bezborodova spoke at the festival and made arrangements to recreate the exhibit together with the original authors - Oleksandr Filonenko, Anastasia Zolotova, Oleksiy Chekal, and Oleksiy Sigov - through the Kule Folklore Centre.
Nataliya Bezborodova, herself from Kyiv, is one of the many Ukrainian graduate students at the UofA who have struggled to keep focusing on their studies while critical events shake their homeland this school year. Nataliya is working on her Master's thesis in Ukrainian folklore, analyzing the role of social media during Maidan. She has a huge database of material collected from Facebook during the critical months of the Maidan. A folkloristic exploration can show how personal experiences illuminate many elements not exposed by normal media coverage and official reports. The Maidan phenomenon is a rich source of contemporary and urban folklore, a physical and social site that continues to generate a great deal of creative human expressions.
The "Maidan: Through Patience to Hope" exhibit has generated great feedback and has been displayed in the Galleria Atrium of the UofA Rutherford Library as well as at the Hankuk University of Foreign Studies in South Korea.
This exhibit is one of several that have been created or recreated in partnerships through the Kule Folklore Centre and displayed throughout Canada. Folklore is the traditional beliefs, customs, skills, arts and stories of a community, passed on from person to person in living context and exhibits have included Journey to Canada: Ukrainian Immigration Experience 1891-1900; Ukrainian Wedding; and Ukrainian Dance: From Village to Stage.