These Virgin Lands Bring Up New Heroes

I had been working on a project about a fictional utopian community in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city and the birthplace of Constructivism, located 35 kilometres from the Russian border. The portraits of people and places, shot with a large format camera in the forests that surround and bifurcate the city, reveal the inhabitants’ simultaneous fragility and strength, and their hidden and camouflaged structures. Then, in February 2022, war broke out. Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and Kharkiv has become one of the country’s most bombarded cities. It has now been nearly obliterated. Some of the people I photographed have fled, others have stayed to resist, still others have been killed. I will not be able to finish the project. Looking at these images now, they appear to be the calm before the storm, as if my subjects could sense what was coming. A return of the ghosts of history, presaging the resistance that would soon be called for.

Tatiana Grigorenko was born and raised in New York. After a brief stint as a professional ballet dancer, she received her BA in Fine Arts and French in 2003 from Amherst College and her MFA in Photography in 2010 from Yale University School of Art. She lives and works in Paris.

Tatiana's work explores the relationship between the individual and their social and political environment. Born in the United States into a family of Soviet political dissidents, she places the representation of history at the center of her practice. Using collage, photography, sculpture and video, her work conceptually explores the role of the image in the construction of history. She examines different strategies of revolt and resistance and turns the hegemonic manipulation of reality into a creative act of opposition.

Tatiana has received awards from the Magenta Foundation, the Lucie Foundation, Creative Capital and Lens Culture. She has received grants from the Thomas J. Watson, Leeds-Marwell and Edward Poole Lay Foundations. In 2018 she completed a residency at CEC Arts Link in St. Petersburg, Russia and was a finalist for the BMW Residency for Photography. She exhibits her work internationally.