Yana Kononova

Izium Forest is an installation centered on the exhumation site in the forest near the Ukrainian city of Izium, where mass graves were discovered after the city’s liberation. Rather than documenting the procedure itself, the work focuses on the symbolic presence of rescue workers—figures in cloaks among the pines—evoking a solemn, almost liturgical assembly. The piece is composed as a five-part panorama. Manipulated film negatives blur the line between bodies and forest, situating the scene within a space where mourning and witnessing converge.

Desperation of Landscape explores the environmental aftermath of the Russo-Ukrainian war through a techno-geographical milieu. Anchored in the destruction of the Kakhovka Dam, the work traces how landscapes—especially around Zaporizhzhia—register catastrophe across geological, industrial, and emotional scales. Combining documentary photography and collage, the project navigates the tension between illusion and factual trace, drawing on the visual tradition of the Romantic mirage. In both the Pilgrimage and Desperations series, human figures move across newly exposed land or rest on reshaped shores, caught in suspended relation to a world where desperation becomes a more-than-human affect inherent to the landscape itself.