Sergey Tokarev: SHE is SCIENCE has an international tour
Many Ukrainian projects launched before the full-scale Russian invasion continue performing and doing their best to support the country’s development. SHE is SCIENCE is one of the charitable initiatives promoting tech education for Ukrainian schoolgirls. It represents an exhibition of 12 prominent Ukrainian female scientists. The project’s initiator, Sergey Tokarev, comments on the project’s goals and plans for further development.
The major objective
SHE is SCIENCE is an educational art project created to underline women’s importance and significant impact in science and break the existing gender injustice in the scientific field. The initiative has gone to the international level by reaching European countries. The next step is to have a tour of the US.
The idea of creating it showed up suddenly with a willingness to conduct a poll and find out whether people can recall a few names of female scientists in Ukraine. But, unfortunately, the result was not encouraging. Some named only one—Marie Curie; the rest could not remember a single one. Sergey Tokarev emphasized that was the starting point of rectifying the situation.
The team project decided to provide content about the life stories of 12 famous Ukrainian female scientists who significantly contributed to science. To achieve this goal, the organizers came up with a creative approach to combine contemporary art and mass literary competition. The five outstanding Ukrainian illustrators were responsible for stylizing 12 portraits of heroines. The second part of the strategy was to undertake an essay competition among girls aged 14 to 21. The winners of the competition were used as captions to the paintings. These captions differ from the traditional ones. They contained not only some biographical information about heroines but also vivid emotions of girls-authors.
“We wanted to create an exhibition so that it would be really interesting for young people to see it and learn the stories of its heroines, without any coercion from teachers or parents,” says the initiator of SHE is SCIENCE.
Promotion in Ukraine and beyond
The SHE is SCIENCE exhibition was carried out on June 10 in Kyiv, 2021. It started with the speech of the First Lady of Ukraine, Olena Zelenska. In addition, the project organizers held a charity auction. The funds raised in the event were aimed to cover the education expenses of the girl-winners.
Later, the exhibition went on a tour of Ukrainian cities. The first cities it visited were Zaporizhzhia, Kryvyi Rih, and Mariupol. Then, it was presented in Poltava, Khmelnytskyi, and Lviv. Totally, the exposition was presented in more than ten cities.
The additional offer of the project is to hand out free copies to all interested public institutions. So, they can hold their own exhibition. Sergey Tokarev said that they didn’t expect to receive so many requests even after 300 copies were handed out. The initiative organizers decided to make an extra issue to deliver it to more school students and get them inspired.
The countries SHE is SCIENCE visited are Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Bulgaria, and France. Great Britain and the USA are the following spots to come with the exposition.
