Olia Koval

Dasha Svertilova

In her latest project, They Used to Be Here, Dasha Svertilova explores the urgent yet deeply emotional issue of the abduction of Ukrainian children by the Russian army. This topic demands a careful and balanced approach—one that raises awareness and shares the stories while safeguarding the children who remain in Russia and protecting the legal organizations working to locate and bring them home.

Svertilova conducts extensive research, collaborating with media outlets, NGOs, and orphanages from which children were taken during the occupation. Through this, she constructs a visual story that blends her own photographs of the children and the places they were abducted from, documentary evidence such as surveillance footage, and visual installations.

With this project, Svertilova seeks not only to draw international attention to the issue but also to pose pressing questions: What does the future hold for these children? She speaks about forced integration and the way the children’s identities get reshaped under the pressure of political decisions, violence, and time.

They Used to Be Here is a work in progress, and we believe that participation in FUTURE will help finalize the project and develop the nuanced visual language necessary to address similar subjects.

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Masha Weisberg

In her project, Inheriting the Silence, Masha Weisberg explores identity formation and examines how the trauma of each generation is muted across time and space. Silence becomes a means of protecting one’s children, while untold stories turn into an archive of memory. 

Weisberg navigates her own traumatic experience of war, grappling with the question of how to shield her son from this experience—or, conversely, how to speak about it in a way that ensures history does not repeat itself. She materializes intangible fears and reflections, using glass as a central medium to convey the delicate experience of motherhood. Glass, with its strength and transparency, allows layers of experiences to accumulate one on top of another—yet it remains fragile, its connections breakable in an instant. 

Weisberg uses silver-gelatin prints on glass alongside pewter fonts on black aluminum. The fonts depict explosions in Ukraine—opaque at first, requiring light to reveal their details. Her choice of materials underscores the intersection of motherhood and war, showing how they shape her identity within a single moment in time and space. The cyclical process of developing each photograph becomes an act of reinterpreting documented events and traumatic experience.

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Vitalii Halanzha

Over the past three years of war in Ukraine, both Ukrainian and foreign photographers have documented countless stories. Most of these capture the immediate realities of a country in wartime. Only now are we beginning to see works grounded in in-depth research that explore the consequences of war, the future during war, and “temporary peace.”

One such project is Underfoot by Vitalii Halanzha, who reflects on how the perception of reality has shifted, how danger has become ingrained in everyday life, and how expectations for the future are reshaped with all the consequences of post-war period. At first glance, his black-and-white photographs show elements of the natural landscape frozen in time: plant stems, tree bark, bodies of water, and soil. But as the viewer looks closer—moving beyond the foliage and foreground details—foreign intrusions emerge. These are fragments of ammunition, mines, and shells, their presence growing daily across Ukraine—all this in addition to countless active, unexploded mines.

The project also speaks to the evolving visual language of Ukrainian photographers working under wartime constraints. Restrictions on photographing strategic sites, limited access to frontline areas, and mobility restrictions and travel ban—for men of conscription age—have “narrowed” the artistic gaze, yet enabling a deeper reflection.

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Olia Koval

Eruption is a project built on metaphor—a transformer that exists both in physical space and in the realm of printed photographs. Olia handcrafts 40,000 soldier beetles to create the Eruption installation in a Kyiv apartment. It’s an allegory for the Russian invasion, mirroring the takeover of peaceful territories and civilian spaces—places that, just three years ago, were considered safe, were home. Step by step, she documents the details of apartments blanketed by a thick layer of “bugs.” The next stage of the project is a self-portrait—a portrait of the victim—where the face and body are also covered in beetles, symbolizing the invasion of both body and mind. These small, “inanimate” creatures embody the highest degree of vulnerability and anxiety.

In her work, Koval often challenges the boundaries between reality and fiction, pushes toward the reading of visual codes and metaphors, and materializes her thoughts and fears in handcrafted objects. Through this process, her stories gain depth and shape, filling the entire space of representation. They urge us to seek answers and confront the hidden corners of our subconscious.

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Viacheslav Poliakov

In his work, Viacheslav Poliakov focuses on the eclectic details of Ukraine’s public environment. Visual eclecticism is a defining characteristic of post-Soviet countries, where architectural styles, traditional ornaments, and commercial symbols of capitalist influence overlap.

In his latest project, Vapno (Lime), he not only catalogs these visual contrasts but also dives into the in-depth research of connections and consequences between the past Soviet influence and the ongoing effort to erase this past from memory—and, more importantly, from public space. He questions whether such erasure is even possible and to what extent everyday propaganda has already shaped us.

The project is at once ironic and deeply critical. It’s a visual analysis of the space we inhabit, an attempt to assess the situation from a distance, and the provocation of the viewer.

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Odesa Photo Days's 2025 nominations were curated by:

Kateryna Radchenko | Director of Odesa Photo Days Festival, Independent curator

Melnichenko Sergiy | Photographer, head of Photography School MYTH

Mykhaylo Palinchak | Photographer, founder of online magazine Untitled