The Eye of Photography presents a new part of “Carte Blanche” with the support of the MPB. Each month, a French photographer presents an original series produced with equipment loaned by the international platform for purchasing, selling and exchanging used photo and video equipment.
Maru Kuleshova’s photographs seek to understand the mechanisms at work constituting a collective memory, and in doing so confront the traumas of war through the making of memories.
Maru Kuleshova – Twinkle
“For a moment, the morning light slipped through the gap in the curtains. And with it, the memories arise. How many have pressed into me since the war?
After Russia launched an all-out war in Ukraine in 2022, I began researching the mechanics of collective memory and post-memory. Thinking about these things, many questions crowded into me, memories invaded me and settled inside me like dust inside me.
Photography became my traveling companion and allowed me to find ways to confront war through non-verbal language. It is as if all the frozen feelings of recent years, so tightly wrapped in a shroud, began to free themselves and take shape in the photographs as the only language where silence and frozen time intertwine.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve had the chance to continue my research with the Sony a7s iii camera and Sony FE 24-70mm f/2.8 GM lens provided by MPB. The featured series focuses on how human frailty and their relationships seek to survive in times of calamity.
Also using a monocle as a lens, I noticed that the softness afforded by this technique gives the photographs a feeling of lightness and seems to completely soften the complex content of my current research.
Maru Kuleshova
Born in 2000 in Abrau-Durso, Russia, Maru Kuleshova now lives in France. In 2024, she was hosted in an artistic residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in 2024. She learned photography as an autodidact.
Over the past decade, Maru Kuleshova has realized to what extent verbal language remains powerless and illusory to bear witness to the trauma of war and, more broadly, the tragedy of life. In many ways, war remains, she says, “a territory of unexpressed human experience, often inaccessible to full understanding.” After the Second Karabakh War, she began to explore the memories of people who had met this fate.
Immersion in their memories produced powerful encounters concretized by images, thoughts and memories that became possible through visual language. Photography then “became an act of love, an attempt to preserve memory and intimacy, both from oblivion”.
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