The Me Before The War No Longer Exists: Ukrainian Portraits (2023-current) is a participatory arts project that uses historic photographic processes to create a visual archive bearing witness to the Ukrainians displaced by war.  The project aims to engage the community in creation of artifacts and facilitate an artistic experience, where the participants feel visible, valued, and their stories preserved. I am interested in emergent properties of collaboration and the agile process of shaping images, where the experience of making is centered. The project explores themes of belonging, liminality, and transition, focusing particularly on the experiences of women who navigate the delicate negotiation between personal lives, communal backgrounds, and their emerging identities as displaced individuals. Ukrainian Portraits address the ambiguity, trauma, and loss that accompany the experience of migration. The resulting images embody a sense of transition, becoming, or being in-between woven into the project's narrative of reclaiming one’s agency.  Through shared presence and creative collaboration, the project blurs the lines between subject, creator, and audience, creating a unique artistic experience. My work is guided by an exploration of collective histories of trauma and how such experiences can serve as a catalyst for communal image-making. Through photography, embodiment becomes a tool for healing, reflecting both individuality and the universality of collective experiences. The images created in this process reveal nuanced perceptions of self, manifesting visually to explore the deep relationship between one’s sense of being and physical presence.The portraits were created during the summers of 2023 and 2024 and feature communities of displaced Ukrainians in Berlin, Stuttgart, Augsburg, Dusseldorf.

This project has been make possible with the support by Rubys Artist Grant and Municipal Art Society of Baltimore City Travel Prize.

Reframing Ukrainian Refugees, text by Lawrence Ross, BmoreArt Issue #16: Collaboration