Aliens

This series is based on archival photographs of my grandmother, taken in her early childhood. After the war began, her mother sent her to be raised by her grandparents in another country, where she eventually grew up. When she returned to Ukraine years later, she no longer had any connection to the people captured in these images.

They were her family. To me — they are entirely foreign people from distant lands. I don’t know their names, their fates, or even how they were related to her. I preserved only her face in the photographs. The rest I erased, drawing spacesuits around them, surrounding them with unfamiliar landscapes. It’s a visual way of expressing distance, disconnection, and the impossibility of touching the past.

This project explores the loss of familial ties, cultural memory, and the deeply personal feeling of alienation within one’s own history.