We decided to change the traditional celebration of the Day of Happiness (20 March) in the face of the war into a year-round Freedom Days programme, organising 7 events in the CulturEUkraine centre alongside the daily activities that bring Ukrainians and Lithuanians together, attracting 5,400 people.  

On 17 March 2022, CulturEUkraine Centre was presented and opened to the public at Kaunas Central Post Office. During the opening, a contact fair was organised with the participation of well-known organisations – Lithuanian Red Cross, Save the Children and the Order of Malta Relief Service, which provided advice and information to all those who wanted to help or volunteer to join the support activities. In total, more than 20 different organisations and initiatives took part in the Contact Fair.    

A public concert was organised for the opening ceremony, featuring well-known Lithuanian artists: songs by Šarukas Joneikis (member of the band Garbanotas), Clara Giambino, electronic music by Messijas and the mathematical rock band Jautì. The concert also featured a trio of musicians from different Ukrainian cities. The concert and the opening of the centre were attended by around 2500 people throughout the evening.  

In the autumn of 2022, the triennial took place in the European Capital of Culture 2022 — the city of Kaunas in Lithuania. Under the slogan UKRAINE! UNMUTED the project spoke to a foreign audience through art and dialogues and called to put Ukraine in unmute mode! The project consisted of several parts: an exhibition of Ukrainian сontemporary art & performance event, a series of discussions with speakers from Ukraine and abroad, a book of essays on Ukrainian culture. The exhibition of the Ukrainian Cross-Section took two floors of the former Kaunas Main Post Office and included 17 art projects: video, installations, objects, painting, graphics, performance and photography. The exhibition contained the artworks of Yana Bachenska, Lia Dostlieva and Andrii Dostliev, Kostiantyn Zorkin, Zhanna Kadyrova, Alevtina Kakhidze, Nikolay Karabinovych, Myro Klochko and Anatoliy Tatarenko, Sasha Kurmaz, Katya Libkind, Kateryna Lysovenko, Pavlo Makov, Sergiy Petlyuk, Viacheslav Poliakov, Andriy Rachinskiy and Daniil Revkovskiy, FANTASTIC LITTLE SPLASH (Lera Malchenko and Oleksandr Hants), Stanislav Turina, Volodymyr Kaufman (project in cooperation with Maksym Mazur, Serhiy Savchenko, Yana Krykun, Sergiy Radkevych, Natalka Shymin, Natalia Lisova).  

The artistic part was curated by Vlodko Kaufman and Serhiy Petlyuk.  

The Triennial of contemporary Ukrainian Art “Ukrainian Cross-Section” UKRAINE! UNMUTED was implemented by Cultural Strategy Institute, NGO Institute of Contemporary Art and Virmenska-35 with the support of Lviv City Council, ZMIN FOUNDATION, International Renaissance Fund and Lithuanian partners Kaunas 2022. The Ukrainian Cross-Section was created at one time as an attempt to find out and tell what Ukrainian art is. The idea of the project is to present the art of Ukraine primarily outside its borders, to be an interpreter of Ukrainian art and culture for a foreign audience.