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Valeriia Zymina
Emotional Blur is a photographic series exploring the state of emotional blurring that arises after the loss of a home and the impossibility of returning to it. The project originates from the artist’s personal experience, for whom the city no longer exists as a tangible physical space, yet continues to live as an inner landscape of memory.
The series does not focus on events or facts, but on the sense of distance between past and present. The city emerges in the photographs through fog, soft light, pastel colors, and unusual landscape perspectives, deliberately stripped of direct documentary qualities. This artistic approach allows the work to address loss without directly representing trauma, leaving space for silence and personal interpretation.
The key idea of the project is to capture not the loss itself, but what persists despite it: warmth, calm, fragile moments of daily life that memory chooses as a form of inner protection. In the series, fog functions as a metaphor for the emotional state. It does not conceal but softens, creating a sense of gentle inaccessibility; it does not block the landscape but gradually dissipates in memory.
Emotional Blur invites the viewer not to observe a specific city, but to experience a universal state—when a place loses its coordinates but does not disappear from a person’s inner space. The project encourages a slow, attentive gaze, in which memory becomes a form of presence and silence becomes a language capable of speaking about loss without words.
I am a photographer and visual artist, born in Donetsk, Ukraine, and currently living and working in Belgium. For me, photography is a language for exploring memory, space, and the quiet emotional states that arise from a person’s interaction with place.
Forced relocation and living between different cultural and social contexts have profoundly
influenced my vision and shaped a new direction in my artistic practice. I work with a minimalist aesthetic, light, atmosphere, and details to create a space of contemplation, where the image becomes a form of quiet presence and emotional resonance.
My academic background in law and philology has significantly shaped my thinking and sensitivity to language, structure, and cultural contexts. Studying these disciplines helped me develop an analytical approach to the image and its capacity to convey stories and inner experience.
The formation of my photographic style was especially influenced by the Kyiv School of
Photography and my training with Dimitri Bogachuk, whose methods of working with composition and visual language became a foundational part of my practice.
Much of my work focuses on architecture, natural landscapes, and sacred spaces. I am particularly interested in photographing Catholic churches and medieval architecture, exploring how the passage of time and societal changes affect perceptions of religion, faith, and sacred space.
I am currently continuing my studies in Belgium, focusing on Medieval art history and aesthetic analysis, which directly influence my artistic practice and shape new directions in visual exploration.
Through photography, I aim to create a space where memory, light, and silence become a language for contemplation, and where minimalist composition allows the viewer to feel the delicate boundaries between past and present, inner experience, and the material world.
My work has been presented in exhibitions in Belgium and France, including Triennale de
Waterloo, Centre Culturel de Waterloo, and New Voices in Paris. I am a laureate of international photography competitions, including the BNW Minimalist Photography Prize and the Minimalist Photography Awards, and my work has been published in National Geographic Ukraine and Photo Vogue. I am a registered artist in Belgium and have over ten years of professional experience.
