Artist
Marysia Myanovska
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.
Oh brothers where art thou?
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.
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’.