top of page
HPR 2026 Logo Text Black.png

Hosted by

Color 2FREELENS Foundation-Logo-RGB-01 Kopie 2.png

OPEN CALL
01 – 30, MAY 2026

Olena Morozova

COUNTRY OF ORIGIN

Ukraine

I knew she would never have children

I knew she would never have children 2018 - 2022 I first started to think about death when I was seven years old. Back then, the word was something very mysterious, strange and frightening to me. I remember that I often thought about becoming immortal. At around the age of 12 or 13, I desperately didn't want to grow up. I wanted to remain a little girl. My personal growing up and the aging of others really frightened me. Still, love-adventure events and domestic matters shifted my focus a bit. Until one day, when I was walking with my eldest son Alexander, who was 4 at the time, by the hand along the path in the yard of our apartment complex and suddenly I stopped, I felt sick and the thought began to throb in my head: "How on earth does this happen? This is how people live, live and die". And fifteen minutes later my husband called me and said: "Your sister is gone." I went into shock and my psyche stayed there long enough, because eight days later I gave birth to my daughter and I really wanted to enjoy motherhood instead of living through grief. So my grief was preserved inside me, I couldn't accept her death then... Ten years passed and I felt the urge to do a project dedicated to my little sister. A project about exploring my personal relationship with death. In creating this project, I wanted to live and let go of a trauma that had been frozen inside me, to explore my sensitivity to distant events, my intuition and childhood premonitions about my sister never having children, to reflect on notions of life and death, reality and illusion, the state of play in its various manifestations. Most of the photographs from the culminating central (red) part of the project were taken after 24 February. These photographs are at the same time a reflection on the events in Ukraine. The information about tortured people (specially children and women) affected me very much and raised up my our old trauma.

bottom of page