“I have this memory, it is vivid. I am a child flipping through my grandmother’s photo album and I see that she has cut my aunt’s face out of all the photographs. Crude oval excisions, most likely make with her tiny embroidery scissors. I don’t know what happened to my aunt, she simply wasn’t there one day. My discovery remains a secret.
Decades later, I find myself looking through my mother-in-law’s box of photographs. Here again, scissors had been at work, along with the human hand. This time, the extractions are different. The scissors larger, as if, severing worlds. Again, the why remains unanswered. I know that at twelve years of age, the Soviet Secret Police took her father. The year was 1936. The rest of her family was lost shortly thereafter.
We do not speak of this ever.”
Lesia Maruschak
These lived experiences coupled with ongoing news stories of cultural genocide, here in Canada and abroad, inspired me to do this work.
Looking back at history, specifically that of Soviet Ukraine, I was triggered by the government’s systemic repression of the Ukrainian cultural and political class, and its destruction of the idea of a Ukrainian national identity – cultural genocide. These government approved programs, led by Stalin and the Soviet Politburo, necessitated the elimination of landowners, intellectuals, spiritual leaders, and their families. Fear, mistrust, and the pressure to conform pervaded all levels of society. This genocidal program culminated in the 1932-1933 artificial starvation of more than 5 million people in Ukraine.
The photograph is implicated in this process. I refer to it as the “soft tool” of genocide which serves the erasure of purged figures, censorship, surveillance, documentation, and intrusion in private lives. In Erasure: Memory and the Power of Politics, I combine the fragments from my mother-in-law’s box with vintage photographs from my collection and my recent work in Ukraine where I conducted research, recovered an archival photographic collection, and photographed the landscape. The images presented as objects and portraits, as if layers of trauma, work to convey the individual and collective lived experience perpetrated by a system that failed its people while the stagecraft of international political and economic powers normalized genocide.
Erasure: Memory and the Power of Politics, the prelude to the long-term project On Genocide, presents a new model monument to historical crimes, one which works metaphorically and abandons the statues of individuals which fail to adequately express the loss and pain that crimes against humanity inflict, many of which have been normalized and continue today.
AWARDS (4)
2018 Getxophoto Post Conflict Reframing A Dialogue, Getxo, Spain
2018 12th Pollux Award, Honorable Mention, Documentary and Reportage
2018 12th Pollux Award, Honourable Mention, Digital Manipulation
2018 12th Pollux Award, Honourable Mention, Fine Art