Born: 1991, Ukraine
Profession: Photographer, curator, educator and founder of the school of conceptual and art photography MYPH
Lives and works: Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine
TATTOOS OF WAR
“Tattoos of War” is as both a personal and collective attempt to reflect on the full-scale war in Ukraine. It is a series of black-and-white photographs in which the subjects – mostly the artist’s close friends, family members, and loved ones stand before the camera with projected images of the war layered onto their bodies and faces. In this way, a new visual layer emerges: a conditional “tattoo” that fixes lived experience and memory, remaining with a person forever.
The project explores themes of layers, collective memory, and pain. The participants seem to choose the memory that hurts the most, yet after years of war each person carries thousands of such moments. This impossibility of choice shapes the collective dimension of the series: everyone has their own “tattoo,” but all of them speak about a shared experience of loss.
“Tattoos of War” deliberately moves away from classical documentary photography, turning instead to storytelling, narrative, and a fusion of conceptual and art photography. The project is not about recording events, but about the traces war leaves inside a human being. About what cannot be erased like memories, pain, and remembrance that remain with them forever.
