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Olesia Saienko‘s project takes the form of a detective investigation, overlaid with reflections on growing up and the physiological and psychological processes involved.
Olesia Saienko: “I slip into the role of a detective and construct the plot by intuitively following the image without knowing the end of the story in advance. The starting point of the series is an archived children’s video that involuntarily conveys a sense of suspense. Something must happen to the little girl in the picture that she doesn’t yet know about. Then the story unfolds through a series of photographs that, with their cinematic aesthetic, intensify the feeling of trepidation. The places, objects and people captured in these black and white images seem to make causal connections, but we don’t see the girls there in the video. It is likely that the investigation is being conducted around their disappearance”.
Olesia Saienko is a photographer from Ukraine and a visual storyteller. She has a master’s degree in psychology. She has been working as a photojournalist and freelancer since 2017. She deals with documentary and conceptual photography and keeps a documentary photo diary. Her practice focuses on fiction, documentary and post-truth, which is a logical extension of her journalistic work.
Olesia Saienko was a 2022 grantee of otte1 – the Schleswig-Holstein Künstlerhaus. She lives and works in Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine.
The exhibition will open on 10 June 2023 at 17:00.
A multiple, a ‘black box’ with original photographs in an edition of 20 copies will be published for the opening.