War Diary
English: Yevgenia Belorusets. War Diary. New Directions, copublished by ISOLARII, 2023, 128 pages
"It was a spring day, the sunspots played on the walls of the houses and on the white walls of St. Sophia Cathedral."
Since the beginning of Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Yevgenia Belorusets has kept a diary in which she reports from the embattled capital. She talks about her parents, about the air-raid shelters, about the images in the media and the images on the street. Frightening images, but also familiar images: because everyday life can also be found in the most horrifying. The author and artist Belorusets writes and photographs - she refuses the omnipresent war language and sets the loving attentive gaze against combat rhetoric and philanthropy against polarization.
Yevgenia Belorusets was writing a war diary from Kyiv, updated in real-time and published by Spiegel (DE) and ISOLARII (EN). It was released daily from 24.2. till 5.4.2022. Each day of the diary included one to five photos. This project has formed the basis for the exhbition works A Wartime Diary, One Day More and Nebenan, as well as for collective edition In the Face of War and for this book.
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Review
― Gal Beckerman, The Atlantic
"Belorusets said the practice of photographing her day has been helpful in fighting the fog of war. That at the end of the day she'll start to write, and look at her collection of pictures from the day, and suddenly, things will come back to her―things she'd completely forgotten. . . . And if taking pictures helps remembering the un-rememberable, the writing helps believing the unbelievable."
― Andrew Limbong, NPR
