The erasure of a nation's identity begins with its youngest generations. Forced displacement, abduction and re-education of children are common practices in colonial wars. History is cruel in its cyclical nature.

As early as 2014, Russia began abducting Ukrainian children from the occupied territories and setting up education camps. Since the outbreak of the full-scale war, the number of children taken to Russia or Russian-occupied territory without the consent of their families has increased significantly and continues to grow: according to Kyiv, 19,546 children have been confirmed to have been forcibly displaced, while Moscow claims that the number reaches over 700,000. Information is being erased, lost and falsified, making it impossible to determine the exact number.

How many children were taken away forever? Which of them will return? What will happen to them after the re-education camps, after growing up in Russian foster families?

What will happen to their lives, their psyche, their sense of identity?

This series is a visual reflection on the forced displacement of Ukrainian children in the context of war. I look at the issue of abduction through the prism of associations and images, and interpret it as the embodiment of one of the greatest fears of children. Children’s portraits were photographed in rescue centers of Save Ukraine NGO.

I’m shaped by the stories of those who came before me. Growing up, I didn’t fully understand that the stories of my ancestors—both spoken and unspoken—were forming my identity. The stories that shaped them—the ones they voiced and the ones they silenced—found their way into my life nonetheless, directing my perception of the world, my choices, and my fears. It’s not always a story that told; often, it is found in absence, in silence, in what is left behind and what is deliberately left unsaid. I observe how silenced hurt and trauma resurface across generations and time. I think about what it means to inherit this silence and how it is both a shield and a burden—how it protects but also erases. Now, as the next link in the generational chain, I wonder what I carry forward to my child and beyond. Am I able to protect my child? Is there even a way to protect, a way to heal past traumas, a way to shield him from the mix of hurt that is passed down and exists in the present? I hold my child and wonder how much of myself—my past and the present world around me—I can silence to protect his future. Is it even the right choice, to keep inheriting the silence? Dedicated to my son Levi, who makes it all matter.

Focusing on the lasting imprint of war on the natural world and on life under constant threat, Vitalii Halanzha exposes the frequent danger that persists as Russian weapons continue daily attacks across Ukraine. Shot in dim and fragmentary light, the images direct the viewer’s gaze downward. The sky is almost absent, replaced by the ground. Scattered across it are the remnants of Russian drones, missiles, and mines collected from the Kyiv region and the frontline, rearranged into quiet, haunting compositions. Light and shadow act as agents of transformation, concealing and revealing information, forcing viewers to search for signs of danger and safety. The images confront beholders with primal fears of the dark and evoke the uneasy terrain of living in wartime. The work references the legacy of early war photography, particularly Roger Fenton’s staged images of the Crimean War. By echoing these methods, Vitalii challenges the role of the photographer as a mere witness, revealing the inherent subjectivity in capturing and framing reality. It resists the tradition of showcasing bodily harm or destroyed cities - images that risk slipping into spectacle or voyeurism. Instead, it turns our attention to nature, where the fallout of war is less documented but equally brutal. Nature here serves as a mise-en-scene for the remnants of hostile metal, as a space where humans, animals, and plant life alike are subjected to violence, poisoning, and collapse. Underfoot lingers in uncertainty, reflecting a reality where danger remains buried, sometimes literally beneath the surface.

40,000 sculpted and hand-painted red-winged beetles are placed in the living room. 8 months of work, more than a week of installation. The work can exist either as a single photograph or as a reconstruction of a room in a public gallery or museum space. War gives birth to werewolves: what used to be safe acquires other opposite meanings. For example, as a living room. A safe, protected space, within the limits of modern Ukrainian realities, can kill you due to an unfortunate coincidence of circumstances. A red bug infestation in a living room is a metaphor for the highest degree of vulnerability and anxiety. There are tens of thousands of them, they vulcanize from the parquet, occupying the room, settling on books and rummaging through things. This is a pseudo-mental project where I create a story about how artist R.B. wakes up one day to the sound of a tree splinter and sees a huge number of bugs in her room. This series of works includes a portrait of the witness, her room, her testimony, and a detailed visualization of the insect. The penetration of fire-bugs into one's private space as an allusion to Russia's military invasion of Ukraine.

Note: This photographic project is a book of 224 pages. I find removing photos from their spreads damaging to the story, so adding full spreads instead of single photos to this application.This book captures a slow natural decay of the UkSSR (Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic) — a strange country inscribed in my birth certificate but erased from modern language. I have never heard anyone say they were born in the UkSSR, even though my generation was born there.This book is about covering painful past with a white paint. About the reclamation of Soviet ruins by post-Soviet people, about lime, silicate bricks, and foam concrete.Most of the photographs were taken in 2016–17, a time when it still seemed possible to simply paint over the rusty legacy of the past.“The Gothic forms persist for a time, but little by little they grow silent, cease to speak, to remind, to teach anything but their own fantastic presence, transcending all possible language (though still familiar to the eye). Freed from wisdom and from the teaching that organized it, the image begins to gravitate about its own madness.”Michel Foucault. Madness and Civilization A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason