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- The Surviving World
Yuliia Shybіrkina
A poetic photographic project created in the city of Pivdenne, Odesa region, based on the artist’s photographs. It explores the search for a new world amid destruction — reflecting on what is born from trauma, loss, and hope. The project visualizes an inner dialogue with oneself after upheaval, set against the background of physical and emotional ruins, while seeking the forces that shape a new generation and the future Ukrainian lands.
The journey unfolds through self-portraiture, landscape, and bodily presence. A system of symbols and signs forms a metaphorical path of a hero or heroine — anyone currently living their experience in Ukraine. The visual language resembles archaic parchments, faded pages of old books, traces of writing and memory: the images appear as if torn from non-existent archives that we can only discover within ourselves during deep inner immersion.
This is not an external journey but a movement inward, where past, present, and future coexist simultaneously. The project explores inner motion, longing, and dreaming as a vital necessity, and the transformation of pain as a form of survival and healing. This search restores a connection with ancestry — with what is transmitted not only through memory but also through gestures, bodies, and silent ancestral testaments encoded in symbols and images.
The images unfold among ruins and everyday spaces, following a metaphorical path where each step becomes an act of strength, struggle, endurance, and the continuation of life. The Surviving World focuses on the inner elevation above circumstances, on attentiveness and belief in the dream of the future. These states make it possible to build, program, and find a surviving world within oneself — in the palms that preserve ancestral patterns, in the feet that travel without moving, because thoughts become wings that lift us above what is happening.
Survival here becomes an act of imagination, faith, and inspiration. To take one’s fear by the hand is to take into one’s hands the experience of all previous generations who fought for this land.
It is precisely in the movement between loss and hope that a new world is born — a world for which we are once again fighting today. Ukraine was, is, and will be — as a living form of memory, strength, and continuity.
Yuliia Shybіrkina (b. 1984, Kalush, Ivano-Frankivsk region, Ukraine) is a Ukrainian artist working with photography and the camera. She lives and works in the Odesa region. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts. Her artistic practice is grounded in photography and expands into video, textile, installation, and artist books.
The artist’s work begins with photography — with an image she discovers within herself. Through an intuitive self-portrait, this initial photographic impulse is later translated into material forms — not literally, but sensorially and intuitively. Photography becomes a point of departure, a kind of portal through which inner states emerge and transform into matter.
Shybyrkina constructs her own inner mythology, where personal experience intertwines with images and symbols that refer to deep cultural memory. In her works, the daily search for beauty and strength interweaves with themes of rebirth and transformation. This biographical fragment forms a personal mythology through which the artist’s self-portraits — in any medium — can be read as archetypal visions.
Her artistic research focuses on themes of memory, identity, and presence. It unfolds through experimental photography, textile interventions, and visual narratives. Recurring motifs in her work include the body, landscape, loss, silence, trauma, and transformation. In her practice she often employs manual and historical techniques, including painting, cyanotype, collage, and embroidery.
The artist also keeps a digital diary #miraclegraphicarts, where she shares found objects, fragments of reality, and visual notes. This process forms a long-term project of daily artistic recording of presence, state, and time.
Education
2015 — Odesa State Academy of Civil Engineering and Architecture, specialization in Fine Arts.
2025 — Participant of the MYPH School of Conceptual and Artistic Photography.
Student of MYPH School of Conceptual and Artistic Photography
Mentorship program of the Ukrainian Association of Professional Photographers (UAPP)
Extended lecture course Conceptual Photography by Roman Pyatkovka.
Projects and Exhibitions
2025
- Longlist, MYPH Prize 2025
- Mentorship Program, UAPP
- Decolonization: Rethinking Spaces and Narratives, Cult of the State — Mykolaiv / Lviv
- Voda Slovak Press Photo — international project with photographers from Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, and Ukraine
- Glass and Steel — Ukrainian photo projects, printed publication, MYPH School of Conceptual and Artistic Photography
- Kharkiv Zine & Self-Publishing Festival (Zine Fest)
- Exhibition of photography, photobooks and artist books, MYPH — Cherkasy, Ukraine
- Ukrainisches Kunsttagebuch, Karas Gallery & Halle Alte Feuerwache — Cologne, Germany
- ArtBees Gallery, within NFT Paris, Paris, France
- Formula of Resilience, Modern Art Research Institute, Kyiv
2024
- II Via Carpatia Biennale IMO, Stary Sącz, Poland
- Invisible Gardens, Taras Shevchenko National Museum, Kyiv
- Filhos do Neiva, Portugal
- Group exhibition Books That Changed My Life, New York, USA
- Art in Metro, ArtCrush Gallery, Melbourne, Australia
- 85,560 Photographs by 12 Kyiv Photographers, Art Bias, California, USA
- Ukrainian Surrealist Photography: The Sphere of the Subconscious, KyivPhoto, Kyiv
- Ukrainian Landscape Photography: My Best Photo, KyivPhoto, Kyiv
2023
- Ukrainian Diary 2022–2023, Ukrainian House, Kyiv
- The Two Thousand Yard Stare — catalogue of contemporary reflective art of the full-scale war
- 14-8-22, exhibition of Ukrainian artists, Germany
- East/West, online exhibition of the project Reflections of War, Kyiv
- Concentration of Will, M17 Contemporary Art Center, Kyiv
- Fresh Eyes, Haute Photographie Boutique, Amsterdam
- Visibles MMXXIII, ONG Pimpampum, Paris
2022
- Fata Morgana, Odesa Museum of Western and Eastern Art
- Touches, Klenik Ethnographic Museum, Slovenia
- Art Spaceship NFT
- Share, Tag or Dye Show, Bucharest, Romania
Exhibition of Ukrainian Women Photographers Organization (NFT format)