MOYA RIDNA

Moya Ridna is a personal revaluation of childhood memories, as mentally stored visual representations. It deals with themes such as notion of home and hope, loss and war.

In the work Moya Ridna combining mixed media and cinematic episodes, I use photography as a medium to close the gap between the image and memory, reality and imagination. It is a visual diary about hope, pain and war; speaking about disaster but from a perspective of a family album and current war events incorporated in it. One of the intentions of the work, created out of a need to put a complicated and sometimes traumatic reality into a story, was to give a visual voice to the ideas and emotions caused by the full scale Russian invasion in Ukraine.

On the one hand, photography is a cut through space and time that captures a moment, and on the other hand, it is a direct depiction of reality. What is this apparent contradiction in relation to life and transience? What are these images of memories in the mind that have never been photographed? Do we remember something because it was "captured" as a photograph or do we want to capture the moments that are special? How do pictures become a story and what would the story look like without pictures to capture the memories?

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Moya Ridna (ukr. моя рідна) means my familiar, my dear, my beloved one. It’s mostly used with nouns, that in Ukrainian language are female, e.g.: mother, earth, language (ukr. мати, земля, мова). This word combination is mostly known from the classic Ukrainian folk song Dearest mother of mine / Ridna maty moya (ukr. рідна мати моя) performed by Kvitka Cisyk.