Oh brothers where art thou?
Marysia Myanovska
Troyeshchyna, a district of Kyiv, was where we were born and spent our childhood. Separated by a river, it’s amongst the largest residential districts in Europe; a ghetto for the working classes who lost their jobs and their confidence in the future. My older brother is the personification of a new generation of young people in independent Ukraine. In the 1990s, he entered a world of criminality, heroin chic, MTV, sex, and the first wave of techno.
Live fast, die young.
I saw his life among a generation that is referred to as ‘lost’. I heard a lot from my brother. I saw a lot with my own eyes. Due to our difference in age, I didn’t always understand.
My brother died in 2018.
My project explores how time and place affect a person's destiny. I use my own memories of my brother – the memories of his friends and those who grew up with him – to reflect on the same places today. I recreate fragments of his own biography, as a means to explore how the young generation has changed in the last 15 years.
Marysia Myanovska (b. 1990) is a Ukrainian photographer, currently based between Kyiv and Hamburg. A graduate of the Victor Marushchenko School of Modern Photography, her work explores connections between particular territories and the people who inhabit them. She is especially interested in stories of young Ukrainians in deprived city districts. In 2022, Myanovska was a finalist of the Hamburg Portfolio Review and the winner of the Nikon Noor Workshop for Photojournalists. Her images have been published by the likes of Vice, The Calvert Journal and Bird in Flight.