Lesia Maruschak’s award-winning photography explores erasure, migration and memory

June Chua · 2019

Editorial note: A 2019 critical reflection on Lesia Maruschak’s engagement with memory and historical erasure, offering context for enduring themes in her practice.

Originally published as an arts column on rabble.ca, this essay reflects on Maruschak’s photography and its engagement with memory and historical erasure.

In Project MARIA, Lesia Maruschak constructs a visual memory of the horrors of the 1932–1933 famine in Soviet Ukraine through two books, installations, a film, textile sculptures, and lectures. When she was around fifteen, Maruschak heard a story—one that would resonate many years later and become a comprehensive photography project that would garner her prizes and critical acclaim. That journey would take more than thirty-five years.

“I finally had something of my own to say [and] the camera was the way,” the artist told me from her home in Ottawa.

The self-taught photographer had returned momentarily from Paris, where she launched an exhibition. Maruschak once had a career in the Canadian civil service until a leukemia diagnosis triggered a change of life. After 2012, she travelled the world to study with Byzantine painter George Kordis, who invited her to be his curator. It was during that time that she began taking pictures with her cellphone and eventually graduated to a suite of cameras ranging from digital to Polaroid. Her initial foray into art-making was pivotal.

“I love flowers, so I shot them and sent the pictures to Kordis,” she explained. “He asked, ‘Do you want the truth?’ They are mediocre. Don’t be captured by beauty, go make art.”

I caught her during a career upswing. Maruschak was about to travel to the United States to collect the Director’s Award at CENTER, which holds the Review Santa Fe Photo Festival in New Mexico. The award recognized Project MARIA, which memorializes the millions of victims of the 1932–33 famine in Soviet Ukraine. The project had already received the Grand Prix Award at the Kyiv Arsenal Book Festival and was shortlisted for other accolades, including the Prix du Livre at Rencontres d’Arles.

“I have a relationship to this past, and what I’m doing by bringing it out to the world is to say: I don’t want our present to look like this.”

In Project MARIA, the artist constructs a visual memory of the period through two books, installations, a film, textile sculptures, and lectures. The work is composed of three main conceptual perspectives: examining a young life and innocence; the psychological effects of famine and starvation; and the artist’s own inability to come to terms with events of this magnitude.

In a sense, Maruschak places herself within the work. “Ancestral traumas reside in us, and my art is an expression of that.”

In the first part of the project, Maruschak reconstructed Maria’s life to imagine the existence of a young girl before the famine. Titled Red, the photographs speak of a young maiden with parents, constructed through collage and abstraction. The second part resulted in the limited-edition artist book Transfiguration, which has been acquired for preservation by institutions including the Library of Congress (Washington, D.C.), Stanford University’s Green Library Special Collections, the Boston Athenaeum, and Butler Library Special Collections at Columbia University.

The final part of Project MARIA engages the act of counting.

“I saw a figure in the news: 34,592 victims. It was some tragedy, but I was struck by that exact figure. That’s the challenge with massacres, famines, and catastrophes. We can never know the precise numbers,” the photographer noted. “Is it enough to say millions of lives were lost? What does that say about mankind—that we can perpetrate that? What are our values?”

Maruschak traced her process back to the Prairies, prompted by advice from her late friend Peter Lindbergh:

“There is one other way to find this place inside of you. This way is less secure, even dangerous and risky, but it could be worth trying. This way would request you to abandon your roots and securities, to maybe find in exchange total freedom and independence from and for yourself and your work.”

She went on a journey.

Maruschak returned to Saskatchewan in –28°C weather, wandering the prairie barefoot, cloaked in a black silk dress. “I crawled the Prairies to learn my point of view,” she said. “The camera became the eyes of my heart.”

The conversation evokes Julian Schnabel’s 2019 film At Eternity’s Gate, about Vincent van Gogh’s time in Arles, France.

“This line in the movie: ‘When facing a flat landscape, I see nothing but eternity. Am I the only one that sees this?’ The seeking of eternity—this is where I’m walking in that dress. I believe it is a place that is visible and invisible, beyond.”

During that journey, Maruschak was reminded of a conversation she had at age fifteen with a survivor of the Holodomor—the forced famine genocide that killed millions of Ukrainians.

“She was the grandmother of a friend of mine,” Maruschak recalled. “She said they had to eat the soles of their shoes.”

This led Maruschak to research survivor testimonies, including that of a nine-year-old child named Maria.

“She talked about her sister being cold and dead in the bed beside her. Then how her mother didn’t get up after being called to eat a bowl of soup. She was the last to die.”

Maruschak, who is of Ukrainian heritage, linked these stories to those of her mother-in-law, who lived in Soviet Ukraine during Stalin’s era and lost her family. She recalls a shoebox of photographs her mother-in-law kept, many torn with figures cut away.

“It’s the idea of erasure,” she emphasized. “There’s a strong tradition of erasure in photography. As politics change, people get wiped out of the collective memory.”

These discoveries galvanized Maruschak to consider the “memory of making,” the decolonization of narrative, and the forces of migration and identity.

“I want to take the Holodomor to a wider audience, to extend it beyond the Ukrainian community in a humanistic way,” she said. “I hope what I’m creating contributes to how we understand the Other and our relationship to the Other.”

I interviewed Maruschak the day after she returned to Canada from Paris. She spoke about encouraging gallery visitors to touch her work—an emotional and visceral connection that binds viewers into the experience.

“I have this piece called The Diggers. It’s a large-scale image, one by four metres, that I have mediated. I go into the landscape with the photograph and allow it to change. I use Byzantine egg tempera techniques—egg yolk, wine, pigments—and then apply ash and resin.”

By inviting people to touch the work, they feel its layers and become part of the performance themselves.

“It’s the transcendence of time,” she said. “The voyage of the work, and that it’s touched by the movement of people.”

First published on rabble.ca, October 23, 2019.