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Open Eye Gallery

http://www.openeye.org.uk Open Eye Gallery is one of the UK’s leading photography spaces. We’re located on the Liverpool Waterfront. Pop by and see us!

28/05/2026

Archival research and multimedia mockumentary storytelling: Death of Lucretia by Andrii Dostliev. Part of Self-Defined exhibition, on at Open Eye Gallery until 7 June 2026.

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A speculative work that balances archival research and multimedia mockumentary storytelling is based on the archive of commercially produced tourist photographs from the small town of Sviatohirsk in the Donetsk region of Eastern Ukraine, which I have been collecting for several years. For decades (at least from the mid-1920s to the early 1990s), a local photography studio sold photographic souvenirs to tourists visiting a local resort.

These photographs included a variety of photo manipulation practices ranging from painted backdrops and hand-colouring of the photographic prints (which were quite common for the respective era) to an unprecedented for Soviet Ukraine commercial photography way of creating composite images made of two different negatives: a portrait of an individual or a group of people taken either outdoors at a random location or even in a studio and an iconic local vista of a Sviatohirsk monastery located on a mountain.

I choose to tell their story as ‘vernacular modernism‘ that existed in indirect opposition to the official modernist project of the Soviet state, drawing on, among other sources, texts by contemporary Ukrainian photography researchers and Renaissance paintings.

Text: Andrii Dostliev
Images: Rob Battersby

Co-commissioned by the University of Salford Art Collection and Open Eye Gallery.

With contributions by Polina Baitsym, Nadiia Bernard-Kovalchuk, Olena Chervonik, and Zhenia Moliar.

27/05/2026

Upcoming events at Open Eye Gallery

📆 Thursday 28 May: the gallery is closed to the public as we're having a symposium. Tickets are still available!
Symposium programme and tickets: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/1989988652629

📆 Friday 29 May: an informal brunch for potential young board members to meet the team: 11 am–1pm
RSVP: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/1988487669147

📆 Sunday 31 May, 1pm: curator's tour of our current exhibition, Self-Defined. Just two weeks left to see this exhibition!
Free, drop in.

📆 Sunday 31 May, 2pm: book presentation and in conversation with Belarusian poet Hanna Komar. We will be discussing solidarity, peaceful protests, collective experiences and experimental writing.
RSVP: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/1989315684764

22/05/2026

Animals in the yard, children playing, celebrations, cabbage fermenting, cemetery visits, and gardening: Archive of Zenta Dzividzinska, House Near the River, 1964-2010, Latvia. Part of Self-Defined exhibition, on at Open Eye Gallery until 7 June 2026.

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Zenta Dzividzinska (1944–2011) emerged from the Latvian amateur photo club “Rīga” in the mid-1960s as a distinct artistic voice.

Her practice was marked by experimental photograms, photomontage, staged photography, and an aesthetic of the everyday, as well as internationally exhibited n**e portraits. Dzividzinska’s works offered a perspective on women that diverged from the prevailing Latvian amateur photo club aesthetics of the time.

In the mid-1970s, Dzividzinska moved away from the photo club environment to focus entirely on graphic design. As participation in photo clubs was an amateur pursuit that offered no financial return, her work in applied design provided the family’s primary source of income. Consequently, the artist's archive remained largely dormant and unnoticed by the Soviet art establishment for nearly twenty years, as her unembellished self-portraits and documentation of everyday life were viewed as having little artistic value.

It was only through Dzividzinska’s late-career ‘autobiographical impulse’ and shifts in the Latvian photography practices that her early negatives and prints were reawakened in the mid-1990s. The documentary series House by the River (1964–2010), which documented daily life in her ancestral home in the countryside (Iecava), took shape during this period. By 2010, Dzividzinska and her daughter, photography scholar Alise Tīfentāle, had compiled a mock-up for a book chronicling a creative career spanning nearly fifty years.

Today, this ‘archival body’ continues to take on new shapes through the active engagement of curators, scholars, and artists who utilise it as a site for academic and practice-led research.

Text: Līga Goldberga
Images: Declan Connolly, Rob Battersby

In collaboration with the National Library of Latvia.

21/05/2026

Building solidarity under repressions: book presentation and in conversation with Belarusian poet Hanna Komar

Sunday 31 May / 2pm–4pm / Open Eye Gallery / free
RSVP: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/1989315684764

During the 2020 Belarusian uprising, a young poet is imprisoned for peaceful protest along with thousands of other ordinary people. Inside the crowded cells she encounters people from every walk of life — teachers, grandmothers, students — each with their own story of resistance. Her book, "When I’m Out of Here" interweaves her story and theirs into a powerful portrait of courage under repression.

As we observe the erosion of civil liberties, the normalisation of detention, and the quiet expansion of state power, this book speaks to our time, finding hope behind bars and the human will to unite in the darkest moments.

Belarusian poet Hanna Komar, author of "When I’m Out of Here", will be joined in conversation by Maria Gulina, Open Eye Gallery’s Communications and Content Producer. Together they will discuss the book as both a document and a literary work, ways to document collective experience that pay tribute to the collective aspect specifically, and the human side of the peaceful protest in Belarus and in the UK.

The book will be available to buy in the Open Eye Gallery's independent bookshop.

20/05/2026

Why and how do we work together to explore history and archives from different perspectives? Can exhibitions make the voices of the excluded heard? Why are artists and curators returning to archives?

Join us for a one-day symposium to explore these questions and hear from the artists, curators and cultural professionals from regions of Europe less represented in the UK cultural sector.

Thursday 28 May / 11am–4pm / Open Eye Gallery

Book your free ticket: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/1989988652629

In partnership with: Liverpool European Festival, University of Salford University of Salford Art Collection, National Library of Latvia, CERS – Cultural and Creative Ecosystem of Latvia as a Resource for Resilience and Sustainability.

Image: Mind of Winter by Karolina Gembara, installation photo by Rob Battersby

19/05/2026

A new publication exploring the history, practice, and future of photography in Ukraine is now available to read in PDF format!

Researching and Curating Photography from Ukraine: reflections, perspectives, challenges brings together scholarly essays, practitioner perspectives, and critical reflections drawn from a symposium held at University of Salford International in February 2024.

The publication covers seven interconnected themes — from decolonising Ukraine’s photographic narrative and recovering fragile archives, to the radical transformation of documentary practice since the full-scale invasion in February 2022.

Read it here: https://openeye.org.uk/new-publication-researching-photography-from-ukraine/

Produced in partnership with Open Eye Gallery, British Council Ukraine, Ukrainian Institute - Український інститут, Ukrainian Photographies, University of Salford University of Salford Art Collection.

Funded by the UK/UA Creative Partnerships programme, designed by the British Council and the Ukrainian Institute.

Image by Alexander Chekmenev

18/05/2026

Family history, political complications and the absence of photography

Photographer Charles Fox and Open Eye Gallery’s Head of social practice Tadhg Devlin discuss the themes of Fox’s recent collaborative book, “Hidden”. The book is a result of a long-term dialog between Fox and dancer Prum Sisaphantha and the journey she made through the Khmer Rouge (1975–1979) landscape carrying over 90 family photographs.

Saturday 23 May / 2–4pm / Open Eye Gallery / free
RSVP: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/1987905585118

The work attempts to articulate both the journey and the narrative, but also as an artifact which has been part prompt in the dialog, and a continued site of production and representation of the journey.

When displayed the book unfolds along a line which was created by a GPS recording of the recreation of the journey.

During this recreation Pantha wrote of her experience during the Khmer Rouge. The writing in Khmer has been translated into English. As the photographs were hidden during the Khmer Rouge, the book also conceals elements of the photographs in response to the absence of photography through shifting political complications.

The book will also be on display. Guests will have a chance for informal discussions with both Fox and Devlin.

Image: Hidden project

15/05/2026

An attempt to restore Indigenous records starting from below – from women’s voices and family photographs that survived exile: Crimean Counter-Archive From Below by Emine Ziyatdin. Part of Self-Defined exhibition, on at Open Eye Gallery until 7 June 2026.

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Rooted in my family’s photographic archive (1914–2004) and my ongoing documentary practice since 2008, the exhibition brings together photographs, documents, and excerpts from recorded interviews with my grandmother and mother. Through these materials, the project reconstructs a lived history of Crimea and Crimean Tatars as remembered from within the family rather than narrated by the state.

The project traces my family’s experience through the 1937–38 Stalinist purges, the 1944 genocide carried out by the Soviet regime through mass deportation, the decades of exile that followed, the return to Crimea amid the collapse of the Soviet Union and Ukrainian independence in the 1990s, and the renewed persecution of Crimean Tatars after Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea.

Displayed as an open archive, the exhibition includes four folders representing the state and the ways colonial narratives are constructed and sustained by the regime. Each folder addresses forms of colonial practice and the privileging of Russian/Slavic identity within the Soviet system, which outwardly promoted ethnic equality while reinforcing internal hierarchies.

These include: the story of my great-grandmother, who was classified as illiterate despite her ability to read and write in Arabic script; the erasure of Crimean Tatar place names following deportation and their replacement with Slavic ones; the removal of the term “Crimean Tatars” from official use; discrimination based on ethnic belonging, including access to free food and school uniforms; and the practice of renaming “difficult” Crimean Tatar first names into Russian-sounding forms.

Text: Emine Ziyatdin
Images: Rob Battersby

08/05/2026

What is the socially engaged approach in photography and education? How are contemporary challenges, including war, political instability, and environmental crises, reshaping approaches to teaching? How does photography respond to the ecological crisis? What are the decolonial approaches to working with archives in the East of Europe?

Wednesday 13 May / 8am – 2.30pm / free, online

These questions will be discussed at Peer to Peer: UK/Ukraine is a one-day symposium in Lviv, bringing together cultural practitioners, teachers, curators, archivists, researchers and students for a direct exchange of knowledge and skills about different aspects of photography.

Speakers will discuss socially engaged approaches to photography, photographic practices in higher education, photographic response to the ecological crisis, and aspects of decolonisation in the East of Europe.

The Symposium talks will be available online with English translation.

Full programme and free ticket: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/1988677647377

The symposium is organised by the Ukrainian Photography NGO in collaboration with Lviv National Academy of Arts, Open Eye Gallery (Liverpool), University of Salford (Manchester).

‘Peer to Peer: UK/Ukraine’ is supported by the British Council’s UK→Ukraine: Culture Sync programme.

Image: With Love. From an Invader, by Yan Wang Preston

06/05/2026

How do you document what is no longer there, or those who are no longer present?

Open Eye Gallery, in partnership with Stable Gallery at St George's Hall Liverpool, is delighted to launch a new group exhibition Absence, curated by sociologists Laura Harris and Maike Pötschulat. Absence brings together the photography of seven visual sociologists, alongside finalists from an open call for photography of absences in the Liverpool City Region.

Exhibition launch: Friday 5 June / 6–8pm / Stable Gallery, St George's Hall

Exhibition continues: 6 June – 11 July / Monday – Saturday / 9.30am – 4.30pm.

Running alongside the exhibition are the submissions from an Open Call for Photography of absence in the Liverpool City Region, which generated hundreds of images that highlight how absence is woven into the built and social fabric of the area.

📸 Public events programme includes:

💫 6 June 2026, 2.30–4pm: Exhibition tour with curators and photographers at Stable Gallery;
💫 6 June 2026, 5–7pm: Absence in conversation. Panel discussion at Open Eye Gallery;
💫 10 June 2026, 2–3pm: Exhibition tour with curators at Stable Gallery;
💫 13 June 2026, 1–2pm: Exhibition tour with curators at Stable Gallery.

Book your free tickets: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/o/open-eye-gallery-15160837143

With support from: The British Academy, Liverpool John Moores University, Open Eye Gallery, Stable Gallery, University of Southampton.

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Opening Hours

Tuesday	10:00 - 17:00
Wednesday	10:00 - 17:00
Thursday	11:00 - 16:00
Friday	11:00 - 16:00
Saturday	11:00 - 16:00
Sunday	11:00 - 16:00

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0151 236 6768

Website

https://openeye.org.uk/whatson/, https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/o/open-eye-gallery-15160837143, https://openeye.us2.list-m

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