© LESIA MARUSCHAK, FAMILY ALBUM NO.1 At the center of the project is a single vernacular image of a young girl, Maria F., who survived the Holodomor and currently resides in Canada. Maria’s transfigured image in this fabricated album alludes to what life might have been like before the famine. The maiden’s garments to the left of Maria are compiled from artifacts in my collection dating to the time of the famine. Maria is 95 and resides in Canada.

© LESIA MARUSCHAK, FAMILY ALBUM NO.2 The MARIA project began with screen captures gathered on the Internet. I eventually put out a call on Facebook and received one unexpected response: a family photograph of young Maria F. with her parents, taken in Ukraine. Maria F. became the heroine of my story.

© LESIA MARUSCHAK, FAMILY ALBUM NO. 3 Maria F. inspired me to create the series RED where I photographed archival garments, dissected Maria’s photograph, scanned a crumbling 19th century album initially used for cabinet cards and created collages with all my raw materials. The result is a fabricated representation of an invisible geography.

© LESIA MARUSCHAK, RELIC NO. 41 FOUR DRIED FISH TO SELL This work is from a series called COUNTING, derived from authenticated images taken by Alexander Weinberger, an engineer who lived in Kharkiv, Ukraine, during 1932-33. An abstract representation of the ancient Salamis counting tool, COUNTING explores my inability to grasp the conscious eradication of human life on such massive scales.

© LESIA MARUSCHAK, The DIGGERS The Diggers is derived from IPHONE captures. The image here is part of a work in progress. When completed it will be a large-scale, heavily worked piece printed on kozo paper, treated with wax, ash and pigment. I am not interested in being bound by categories and so, while my work is photo-based, it draws from multiple arenas. It is unstable, dynamic, moving from one form to another; a type of translation, where no single practice dominates.

© LESIA MARUSCHAK, DIPTYCH: DAMNATION / BRAT DAMNATION manifests a mediated antique prayer book found in the markets of Ukraine, 2017. This time it is in red, as if bearing witness to the horror. The work BRAT, the Ukrainian word for brother, is an example of the artistic gesture I created in my digital lab to give a palpable presence to the millions who perished. The mediated images are painstakingly treated with ash and wax giving them an almost leaden presence. My transformations of documents into artworks work to give tangible materiality to this modern-day atrocity.

© LESIA MARUSCHAK, MOLYTVA NO. 1 This work presents 5000 layers of sacred text derived from an antique prayer book found in the markets of Ukraine, 2017. The image – a hallmark of the series’- explores the tortuous process of a starving body turning into skin and bone. Egg tempera, gold and various pigments are applied to images printed on kozo paper and then pigmented with ash, wax, resin and salt. These materials arise from my interest in Byzantine art. In these paper works, aspects of the surface come into play as the materials, brought into action with my hand, disappear (or not) into the paper. The works are scarred with lumps of ash. Trapped by wax, they hide retraced cryptic words in Old Church Slavonic, a language that has been dead for centuries. They oxidize when exposed to light and temperature changes, they bear traces of suppressed hand marks and finally they are degraded with audience’s human touch.

© LESIA MARUSCHAK, MAMA For me, Maria’s mother is a metaphor for a nation, a people, for the endless struggle where geopolitical boundaries, economics and more fracture our societies and position wo/man against wo/man resulting in countless losses. The works in this series are dynamic and performative, revealing conditions of the body through the laborious methods of making; bringing forth presence where there was absence. Materials are caught in relation to each other and the world in which they occupy space – the tangible world, the space of the audience and of the future.

© LESIA MARUSCHAK, THE HORSE WAS NEXT New constructions facilitate memory making, reveal a context, and create a space for the viewer to experience and revisit the famine in Soviet Ukraine. I want this project to transform the ways we remember this tragedy, and inform how we relate to similar ones, keeping the experience of the art located in the present.

© LESIA MARUSCHAK, Home

© LESIA MARUSCHAK, DIPTYCH: BLUE CHILD / REQUIEM There are very few people still living who personally experienced the Holodomor. I have known three – all of whom are now dead from old age. Only one spoke to me of the event, describing the lack of food and how they ate the soles of their shoes. Testifying before U.S. Congress, witness Tetiana Pavlychka remembered that her sister, “had a large, swollen stomach, and her neck was long and thin like a bird’s neck. People didn’t look like people — they were more like starving ghosts.” In 33-I Holod — an archival publication compiled by Volodymyr Maniak and Lidiia Kovalenko — Mykola Stepanovych Pud recalled that his mother “looked like a glass jar, filled with clear spring water. All her body that could be seen … was see-through and filled with water, like a plastic bag.” In the same book, Anastasiia Maksiymivna Kucheruk could not rid himself of the memory of a child sitting, rocking its “body back and forth, back and forth,” reciting one endless “song” in a half voice: “eat, eat, eat.” These witness accounts run through my mind and emerge in my work like cinematic impressions: the repetition of the word “eat” by that child, the descriptions of humans translucent as glass jars, almost palimpsest like.

© LESIA MARUSCHAK, DIPTYCH: FINAL TRANSFIGURATION The MARIA Project, conceived of as a memorial act, bears witness to the many phases of its own gestation, which eventually turns into a memory of its own creation, to be experienced in a public space. This process of memory-making is shared with audiences to capture multiple dimensions of time. It iis a space for viewers to bear witness to an historical event by immersing themselves in a sensory experience and participating in the creation of individual and collective memories: themselves becoming creators of history.