Born: 1981, Belarus
Profession: Photographer / Artist
Lives and works: Wroclaw, Poland
THE COLOUR BENEATH THE GREY
I arrived in Belgrade with a sense of recognition. Coming from Poland, I am familiar with this material language — concrete, repetition, façades that have outlived the systems that produced them. Across many Eastern European cities shaped by modernism and political transition, architecture remains while its original narratives fade. I do not photograph these buildings as monuments. What interests me is the life that unfolds within their weight.
In my images, architecture is a presence — not dominant, not decorative, but formative. It defines scale, distance, tension. Courtyards, entrances, staircases, fragments of façades: these are spaces where everyday life takes shape. The geometry is strict, often repetitive, yet never fully closed. People do not simply occupy these environments; they alter their atmosphere. A body leaning against concrete changes its temperature. A gaze directed outward shifts the meaning of a wall. Small gestures interrupt uniformity without dismantling it. The “colour” in this work is not literal. It is the intensity of human presence inside inherited structures. In cities often described as grey, I search for that subtle charge — where rigidity meets vulnerability, where permanence encounters breath.
Through Belgrade, I reflect on a broader post-socialist condition: we continue to live within architectures designed to define collective identity, yet meaning is continuously rewritten through individual existence.
Concrete endures. But it is people who give it tone, scale and resonance. They are the color beneath the grey.
