The 7th Annual Passion for Freedom Art Festival took place at the Mall Galleries, located in the heart of London, between the 21 - 26 September 2015. Passion for Freedom festival is a non-profitable organisation gathering the most promising contemporary artists from all over the world, who express their concerns with human rights, equality and freedom of expression issues through a mixture of media - painting, sculpture, print, photography, installations, and video. The public had a chance to select their favourite artists and vote for the best piece of art. This year Ukrainian artists entered the “Passion for Freedom” competition in London for the first time. Four Ukrainian contestants participated in the festival and achieved two awards - 2nd prize at the General Awards and 3rd prize at the Freedom Film Awards.
Ukrainian visual artist Dmitry Iv received the 2nd Prize for his sculpture “The Need for Freedom” in the general visual arts award. This is a sculpture of a female figure made of 4 thousand welded steel chains, that gives an impression of a woman levitating up in the air against the gravity and heavy chains pulling her down to the earth.
Babylon`13 production's documentary film“Stronger than Arms” won the 3rd Prize in the film section awards. Producer of the video Marko Suprun dedicated the award to a film director Oleg Sentsov who is detained on suspicion of terrorism and all other Ukrainians who are illegally arrested and are deprived of freedom by Russian authorities and are held at prisons in Russia.
Ukrainian artists touch on painful subjects of Russian aggression on Ukrainian territories, the annexation of Crimea and the political imprisonment of Ukrainian citizens by Russian security services. Ukrainian-born British artist Olga Brown presented her work “Nadiya Savchenko. Putin’s Hostage” to honour Nadia Savchenko, a female Ukrainian pilot who has also been captive by Putin`s regime since June 2014 and now symbolises Ukrainian spirit and the hope in our fight for freedom and peace. Natalia Formosa criticizes the aggression by the neighbouring country through her artwork “The Kerch Bridge” which depicts the annexation of Crimea and the war in Donbas as a brutal rape. Let us congratulate these Ukrainian artists in winning the awards and hope that this small victory for Ukrainian art will bring recognition of our passionate and profound work and could help in a prolonged and tireless fight of our nation for freedom, justice and serenity.
