Masha Pryven: I am from Luhansk—a city on the russian border that has been occupied since 2014. Now, it’s a place of no return. I spent my childhood and early adolescence there in the 1990s—difficult times, a turbulent decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union, organized crime, electricity outages, anxiety, precarity, but also happy times—literature, poetry, longing for a bigger world, and the ability to share it all with friends. Literature helped me to emerge from those grim realities.

In 2005, I went to Kyiv to study. It was the city of my youth—vibrant, buzzing, magnetic, filled with dealings and hustling, with a sense of openings and possibilities, but also dangers, especially for young women. Self-expression, self-imagining, sexuality, the literary magazine »Sho«, writing, traversing and transgressing in the times of new beginnings —the 2000s—for both myself and the country.

Then, I received a Fulbright scholarship to study literature and critical theory in St. Louis.

It was the Obama era, also a time of promise for the USA. After two years there, I was able to recognize my privilege—receiving a stipend, having insurance, and studying in an ideal setting—and link them to the inequality and racial divides I witnessed in St. Louis. There, I volunteered for a center helping Spanish-speaking children who fled the US-Mexican border with their homework, many struggling to make eye contact. This was my first experience working with a traumatized community.

At some point, I returned to Kyiv. And then the war started in 2014. I left for Berlin, my family fled Luhansk, my grandmother lost her mind, and the world of promise collapsed, really.

On February 24, 2022, I was here in Berlin, where I live, in the darkroom the whole day, developing films, not knowing. When my husband told me later that day that »they were trying to capture Kyiv,« I didn’t believe it, because it was inconceivable. I stayed, so to say, in that darkroom.

I needed a couple of days to fully accept the fact of a full-scale invasion and react and act as a volunteer. At that time, doing art was helping, and helping was doing art. I think my project See what I see (2022–2023) was born out of that sentiment. Ukrainians fleeing from the occupiers started sending photos and messages from their mobile phones to communicate their situation to us volunteers. I started collecting their photos right away. I was in contact almost daily with around thirty other Ukrainians for 1.5 years. They were documenting their lives with their mobile phones in different circumstances: fleeing, returning, living under occupation, and resisting. I formed a chronological archive of the photos, which became, for me, its own form of war photography.

There is still attention on Ukraine, but it is dwindling. It is a difficult time for Ukrainians abroad, too. There is a lot of heaviness. You are always carrying the war inside you; it splits your mind and heart. Often, you are suddenly in disbelief: this ongoing devastation is geographically so close to Germans and yet so far for them. Several times in »Western Europe«, I found myself in conversations where someone »explained« to me that the international media portrays russia in a worse light than it deserves. I go to Ukraine regularly for my current project, and there I feel safer—psychologically—because when russian missiles fall on your head, it is just a fact, not an opinion of people who know about war from a screen. So, I think, generally, the gap between those who know, empirically or otherwise, and those who have an opinion is growing here. The last political race in Germany revolved around the war in Ukraine and, as a result, empowered those who have an opinion about what »peace for Ukraine« should be.

This is the politics of attention you are talking about. This is cruel; this works. After each terror attack committed by russia against Ukraine, significant enough in magnitude, support from the EU strengthens in terms of financial help and resources. This year, there was a missile attack at the Okhmadyt Children’s Hospital in Kyiv with oncological patients inside. The world has seen the aftermath—photos of children, some of them on IVs, with bald heads, sitting outside near ruins, waiting for evacuation. The question is: WHAT, which will be even WORSE, SHOULD happen to change the course of this war? And then—what country is the next one to be attacked by russia so that the Europeans will think it is THEM now? Germany? France? Maybe. Estonia? Latvia? Maybe not. How much will it take until THEM becomes US? Ukraine was very close, but obviously not close enough.

I have done various works about the war in Ukraine, in which I reflect on war, language, and the representability of war. My next exhibition project is created together with Victoria Lykholot, an artist from Kharkiv, based in Berlin. We will invite different perspectives from various countries—all affected by russian imperial violence to varying degrees. We aim to explore the root causes of war and focus on women’s experiences, which are still largely overlooked in art, whether in times of war or not. We will also collaborate with each other in this exhibition and explore forms of transnational solidarity.

For me, it is difficult to say how connected the Ukrainian diaspora is. As for supportive figures in the art world, Boris and Vita Mikhailov, who live in Berlin, come to mind. I met them when I was starting out in photography in 2018, and they accepted me as a newcomer and have been supporting me ever since. Boris is an enormously important figure, not only in art and photography, but also as a teacher. In the course of our private conversations, I started to engage more deeply with the media I work with: photography and language, but also with the topic. My current long-term work about life during war, for which I regularly go to Ukraine, involves collective experimental writing and is a result of this engagement. I also learnt to see my work and works of my contemporaries as carrying larger ideological and political messages: what do you say about your subject, to whom and what does it mean for the topic?

I think throughout his oeuvre, Mikhailov has unapologetically reflected on the ideological violence of the Soviet regime on the body. In a way, many Ukrainian artists today are building upon that in the current context.

Here, I want to mention Yuriy Gurzhy, originally from Kharkiv, a musician, DJ, producer, and author. He moved to Berlin when he was 20. He is very active in both Germany and Ukraine, working within both contexts: his recent projects include composing music for an exhibition about Wassyl Stus at the Pilecki Institute in Berlin and collaborating with Serhiy Zhadan on their album Semafory, the third album of their duo Zhadan/Gurzhy.

I also want to mention Ganna Gryniva. Ganna, an exceptional jazz singer and musician, emigrated from Ukraine to Germany in 2002. She blends Ukrainian folklore with jazz, improvisation, and experimental music; she makes research trips across Ukraine to gather material for her work. Also, there is a very young Ukrainian band, Foso, from Enerhodar and Kupiyansk, based in Berlin, that creates a vibrant mix of downtempo, trip hop, and lo-fi genres.