CLOSE UP: FORMAT FESTIVAL FINDS – 4 STANDOUT PHOTOGRAPHERS FROM THE PORTFOLIO WALK

The MARIA Project memorialises the 1932-33 famine in Soviet Ukraine – the Holodomor – an event widely thought to be genocidal. The word Holodomor is a combination of the Ukrainian words for hunger (holod) and extermination (mor). It is a complex, highly debated, historical event. There are many vested interests, and hence many diverging stories. Eyewitness accounts attest to the fact that the famine was political and intentional; a state-sponsored assault on a single ethnic group as part of the Soviet Union’s new socio-economic model that required the subjugation of a sizeable population whose national consciousness stood in the way of the new order.

There are very few people still living who personally experienced the Holodomor. The artist knew three – all of whom are now dead from old age. Only one spoke of the event, describing the lack of food and how they ate the soles of their shoes. At the center of this project is a single vernacular image of a young girl, Maria F., who survived the Holodomor and currently resides in Canada. The MARIA Project began with screen captures gathered on the Internet. Maruschak eventually put out a call on Facebook and received one unexpected response: a family photograph of young Maria F. with her parents, taken in Ukraine. Maria F. became the heroine of the story.

Egg tempera, gold and various pigments are applied to images printed on kozo paper and then pigmented with ash, wax, resin and salt. These materials arise from the artist’s interest in Byzantine art. They oxidize when exposed to light and temperature changes, they bear traces of suppressed hand marks and finally they are degraded with audience’s human touch.

Maruschak wants this project to transform the ways we remember this tragedy, and inform how we relate to similar ones, keeping the experience of the art located in the present. The MARIA Project, conceived of as a memorial act, bears witness to the many phases of its own gestation, which eventually turns into a memory of its own creation, to be experienced in a public space. This process of memory-making is shared with audiences to capture multiple dimensions of time. The MARIA Project is a space for viewers to bear witness to an historical event by immersing themselves in a sensory experience and participating in the creation of individual and collective memories: themselves becoming creators of history.

Lesia Maruschak is a photography-based artist with a unique lens on the creation of mobile memorial spaces. Born in 1961 in Saskatchewan she spent her childhood on the Canadian prairies. Maruschak’s work informs and expands what it means to create memorials in an age where the “what and why of museums” is in question.

Her humanist approach and abstract sensual representation of modern-day atrocities set her apart from other photographers, at a time when photojournalism and documentary evidence continue to shape truth telling and proof seeking roles of memorial museums.