Camouflage / Sisterhood

"Women are acting the main role in my pieces, their feelings, sensitivity, their wounds; lives that have been stolen by war; straggles and deepest worries"

Hello!

I am Zhenya Semenova, currently I am in Basel. actually I am from Ukraine, Kyiv, but I was born in Starokostiantyniv, where my childhood was going. I started to take pictures as a child as I lived with a female-artists; but it was not so important to me, but every time I saw my mom and grandma taking pictures of me, themselves, landscapes, portraits and even footage with stories that they came up with on their own, over the years I notice that inside me they leave this love, a love to look through the lens of camera; a love to catch people from different perspective and life sides, a love to watch and observe everything through the prism of focus. We lived all time together, and this female-community influence gave to me a lot of appreciation, pride and adoration to all of the female being.

"Sisterhood" - a project, series of photos taken during the war in Ukraine, where I experienced and live every second of our female-existence. So even now, women are acting the main role in my pieces, their feelings, sensitivity, their wounds; lives that have been stolen by war; straggles and deepest worries. Now, because of the war in Ukraine I cannot see my family, and I always try to keep this feeling in my work too.

"Camouflage"- an art project, made in September, 2022, where I explored merging of appearance with surrounding, when you had everything in your past life to be somebody, and only when you wear a "red tights" you can get your memory back. "Red tights" was taken as an ironic approach to recreate a trigger, trigger which made to remember who you actually was.