The “CIRCLE” captures everyday life in Ukraine during the war years, in the ambivalence of life, where ‘joy and disappointment, war and douleur interwine, ’ as the tattoo of one of the characters says.

There is no military action in the photographs of the project; only the time and date indicate the war reality. And immediately these photographs become war photographs. This is a reflection of the local’s view. Everything around us speaks of war. While submitting my work to photo festivals, I was fortunate enough to see the projects of my fellow countrymen. They are all about war. Every single one. Mine too. Why, having experienced war, it is the only thing we reproduce? Do people have a choice what to talk about, or is that choice determined by experience? 

The answer is in the photographs.

It is a gaze full of compassion and rage that I have, we have. What is happening in Ukraine, everyone can know it, but to feel it? The pain is no longer only in the physical or material damage of the war, it is in what we inflict on ourselves to show that we are still alive. This gaze is therefore not that of a documentarian but the guilty gaze of a Ukrainian woman, who, like all the others, feels guilty for being alive, guilty for not contributing enough, guilty for not winning, guilty for being a woman and escaping conscription so easily.