margo ovcharenko

with feathers

2022- ongoing

The work opens with reflections on the impossibility of continuing photographic practice as it existed before. It addresses psychological pressure, failed expectations of conflict photography, and the lack of accreditation caused by my legal status. From this point, the project moves into the emotional weight of war: isolation, grief, and deaths in my family on both sides of the border.

The series alternates between images with text, images without text, and several text-only fragments. Two of these are lists of remembered addresses and places where I celebrated my birthday, functioning as imaginary vernacular photographs that register absence and displacement. The work ends with a city photographed from above, a movement toward the edge of a fence that oscillates between suicidal thought and the impossible flight of a flightless bird.

Positioned outside the thin walls of the zoo, the viewer is reminded how easily one can find oneself behind bars. The birds appear trapped and exposed, pressed by isolation yet driven by a persistent desire for freedom.

In the With Feathers project, photographs coexist with printed text, where the text functions as my diary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the photographs of birds act as stand-ins for the narrator’s emotional state. The series began in Kyiv in 2022 as an attempt to find tenderness in images of decorative birds, but it evolved into its opposite: the horror of captivity, exile, and loneliness. At first, I wrote these texts as a Ukrainian artist who grew up in Russia and returned to her homeland, and I continue the project through photographs of birds from three different countries, as a person effectively living without citizenship.