The Me Before The War No Longer Exists: Ukrainian Portraits is a participatory project that engages the community of Ukrainians displaced by war in collaborative creation of wet plate collodion portraits, with the aim to provide a platform for refugees to reclaim their sense of selfhood.
The project is framed through photography’s function to reflect society and convey truth, poetically. Utilizing it as a form social practice, I facilitate collaborative creation of portraits, using the historic wet plate collodion process, digital photography, and video. I am interested in emergent properties of collaboration and the agile process of shaping images, where the experience of making is centered. Ukrainian Portraits aims to bring visibility to people displaced by war, who are engaged in a delicate negotiation between their personal lives, communal backgrounds, and their emerging identities as displaced individuals. This project is guided by my own experiences of displacement; it addresses the themes of belonging, ambiguity, liminality, and subjectivity. The resulting images reflect a sense of transition, becoming, or, being in between, woven into the project’s narrative of reclaiming one’s selfhood. My creative role intertwines with the complexities of immigration, trauma, loss, and ambiguity that surrounds it. Through shared presence and creative collaboration, a unique artistic experience emerges, blurring the lines between the subject, creator, and audience.
Bio: Elena Volkova is a Ukrainian-born artist and educator, whose creative practice uses historic and contemporary photographic techniques to delve into the complex themes of liminality by exploring the nuances of subjective experiences. Volkova exhibited nationally and internationally, and has been a recipient of Rubys Grant, Baltimore Municipal Art Society Travel Prize, and a fellow at Hamiltonian Artists, in addition to other recognitions and awards that support her creative practice. Volkova has been a social practice resident artist at Maryland Center for History and Culture, Anacostia Arts Center, and Maker General among others, and her work is included in various private and public collections, including Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore Museum of Art, and MDHC. Volkova resides in Baltimore, MD and teaches Photography at Stevenson University.
