TEXTS
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Alexander Chekmenev’s Portraits
In a series titled ‘Faces of War’ (2022-23), you might expect to see the hardened stares of battle-ready soldiers in front of the camera, but here are the faces of everyday people. Citizens of different ages and walks of life. These are the witnesses, the displaced,…
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Daily Lives of the Displaced. Igor Chekachkov
War means disruption. The forced displacement of people. In this series Igor Chekachkov documents the daily lives of people who have been forced to leave their homes due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Now sharing a living space with host families and other displaced Ukrainians,…
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Temporary Homes. Daria Svertilova
Daria Svertilova’s series Temporary Homes began in 2019 and is an ongoing, long-term documentary project. The work explores the independence of younger generations of Ukrainians in their living environments, something that Svertilova sees as symbolic of broader social and political change in a country moving towards…
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Homesickness or the home of sickness. Text by Vakhtang Kebuladze, photographs by Mykhaylo Palinchak.
It is a sad trait of people to realize the value of only when they lose it. Therefore, the value of one’s home becomes tangible for many only through its loss or the threat of losing it. If we believe the German poet and philosopher Novalis…
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Portraiture of post-Soviet labour, territory, and self: ‘Abandoned People’ by Valeriy Miloserdov
Contributing to the end of Soviet rule and Ukrainian independence, the miners’ strikes starting in the late eighties became a fundamental part of Ukrainian history, even if this was not the intention. Between 1989 and 1998, strikes in the mining region of Donbas in eastern Ukraine…
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Looking Back and Forward: Yaroslav Solop’s Eternal Return.
In 2011, Yaroslav Solop went on holiday with a group of friends to the coast of the Crimean Peninsula near Sevastopol. ‘My friends and I spent hours in deserted places,’ he recalls, ‘exploring the sky and rocks, quoting Homer’s Odyssey, picking small pebbles with our hands,…
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“To Know Us Better”. Curator Amelie Schüle on Anton Shebetko’s exhibition at Foam museum in Amsterdam.
Anton Shebetko (1990, Ukraine) uses extensive research to highlight the Queer history of Ukraine and its absence in this nation’s public memory. He works actively with members of the Ukrainian LGBTQ+ community that flourished within a conservative Ukrainian society. Through interviews and archival research, Shebetko strives…
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The Giant
If you try to define the project’s genre, it will be difficult to do so because of its hybridity and blur. In essence, this is a self-portrait (mainly full or half-length portraits), but in an environment, including a landscape. The unique quality of the project is…
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Mutilated Images Of History (Boris Mikhailov, Evgeniy Pavlov)
Can photography be seen as a privileged tool of historiosophical reflection? “One period is collapsing, and the other is beginning. (…) When one thing and the opposite existed at the same time. It was this zero moment that I saw”, Boris Mikhailov recalled. Much like a…
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‘The War Engraved On Film’. Kateryna Filyuk on photography of Oleksandr Glyadyelov
Although Oleksandr Glyadyelov’s photographic practice covers a vast span of topics this text will focus on photographs taken by Glyadelov in eastern Ukraine, where the war has been ongoing since 2014 and his documentation of the Russian invasion of Ukraine that started on the 24th of…