Artist
Lisa Bukreyeva
Lisa Bukreyeva (b. 1993) is a photographer based in Kyiv, Ukraine. Since her journey with photography began in 2019, her works have been presented at a range of museums and festivals, including Photo Elysée, Lausanne; Noorderlicht Festival, Groningen; and Deichtorhallen – Internationale Kunst Und Fotographie, Hamburg. Meanwhile, her images have featured in the likes of Der Spiegel, Zeit, The New York Magazine and Blind Magazine. Bukreyeva is a member of the Burn My Eye collective.
2402. War Diary
War is the most terrible manifestation of humanity. No film, book nor photograph can convey the horror of what happens. Even the person living in it is never fully aware of all the pain – because it’s impossible to live with it. Literally.
24.02.2022. When Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began, the flow of time transformed, and I realised I could no longer distinguish a change from one day to the next. Everything merged into a single long moment, and I started keeping a diary. Textual and visual. It helped me structure things and my feelings.
Scars of a lost Humanity
The realisation that even those living in war are incapable of understanding the horror of what’s happening – because it’s impossible to live with. Literally, it’s impossible to live with. When you take a photograph, you always analyse whether or not it’s enough; does this photograph show what really happened here? But it’s impossible; the fear, the willingness to die, the courage of the brave defenders, the pain of being either an eyewitness or a victim of the Russian military are all impossible to convey. It smells different: the war smells. You walk through shell casings, through shards of homes, past kids who look like they’ve lived multiple lives. They’ve seen things that no one should see.
As a photographer, it’s freeing, because whatever you do won’t be enough.
Marcin Kruk is a Polish photographer who has been documenting his life between Poland and Ukraine since the beginning of the full-scale war in Ukraine on February 24, 2022. Kruk is also a member of The Archive of Public Protests, created by a group of Polish photographers as a project of visual activism. The topics that Marcin explores prove that taking pictures is a socially important mission for him.
Lisa Bukreyeva comes from Kiev. Before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, she had been documenting the lives of Ukrainian teenagers, but then the lives of these young people changed dramatically, and two of her more recent projects – Scars of Humanity and 2042 War Diary – document this change. So different from the images we are accustomed to seeing in the media, these two projects reveal the devastating experience of war.
Marysia Myanovska presents the pre-war experiences of Ukrainian youth. Recreating the story of his older brother through photographs, memories and stories, he takes us on a journey back in time to the 1990s – the first years after the collapse of the USSR. When talking about the past, Marysia avoids using archival materials or direct references to historical events and in this way, the project also becomes a poetic story about being lost, young and searching for one's place.
Ihar Hancharuk is a post-documentary photographer and visual artist from Belarus. Raised in an authoritarian country, Hancharuk is critical of phenomena and tools such as propaganda or upbringing in the cult of fighting and sacrifice for the homeland. He uses photography, video and digital archives to analyse the media message and its effects upon society.
Kinga Wrona is a documentary photographer from Poland. In his project 85 he shows the effects of the eruption of the Cumbre Vieja volcano on the island of La Palma, Spain. The strength of this cycle is primarily its precision: there are just ten near-abstract photographs showing what can happen when ‘nature entered people's lives suddenly and unexpectedly’.