Elena Subach
‘We Don’t Want to See This Anymore’, 2024, 12 х 55 x 70 cm
With photography, Elena constructs what she calls the Myth of Silent Stories and Heroic Epics, working with so-called silent themes—seemingly inconspicuous and inapparent. The series ‘We Don’t Want to See This Anymore’ comprises portraits of the artist’s friends who have remained in Ukraine during the russian–Ukrainian war, shown with their eyes closed. That gesture was intended to convey a sense of indifference and distance—when a viewer approaches the portraits, they do not look back. Yet the portraits revealed much more—a state of vulnerability, self-absorption and focus on one’s own thoughts because reality is terrifying. Behind each portrait lies a story whose central thread is the impact of war on people’s lives. For Elena, it was important to tell these stories; therefore, the portraits became diptychs. She supplemented them with fragments of life that, through images and symbols, narrate the sitters’ stories of how the war has affected them.
