Conceptual Photography Festival in Odesa
In Odesa, at the Hrushevsky Scientific Library, the Ukrainian conceptual photography festival «Refraction» is taking place from May 3 to May 17.
The exhibition features works by Ukrainian photographers from cities such as Odesa, Ivano-Frankivsk, Zaporizhzhia, Kyiv, Khmelnytskyi, Dnipro, Kropyvnytskyi, Kryvyi Rih, Poltava, and even from the German town of Fladungen.
The main theme of the exhibition is the transformations of identity influenced by the environment.
Refraction is not just a physical process of changing the direction of light; it serves as a metaphor for how our self-perception evolves over time and experience. Bending is not destruction, but transformation. When light passes through glass or water, it changes shape, creating new outlines and illusions. Similarly, people experiencing changes may lose their integrity, becoming unrecognizable even to themselves, or they may become something new—more creative, more confident, and more whole, - explained the curator of the exhibition, Maiya Makeyeva.
One of the artists, Nata Chernenko, noted that art provides psychological relief during wartime.
I named my work «The Fold of Deleuze». The photograph depicts my bag. I unexpectedly noticed this fold of nylon one evening after training. The philosopher Gilles Deleuze once viewed a fold as a unit of matter, - Nata Chernenko explained.
