KRENYCHI. They Were Here… Viktor Marushchenko

From 1988 to 1997, Viktor Marushchenko (1946-2020) repeatedly visited the small village of Krenychi, located near Kyiv. He immersed himself in the everyday life of those who remained in their homeland, those who "were here."

The pillar of the village community was Oleksandr Kubelius. Like the church standing in the center of the village, Father Oleksandr gathered elderly people around him, supporting one another in their daily joys and sorrows.

The photographer preserved for us the images of these people — how they celebrated Easter, the Honey Feast, welcomed guests, cultivated their gardens, and lived out their lives in a place that seemed frozen in time.

This is not merely an ethnographic series or a visual chronicle. In Krenychi, Marushchenko explores the theme of presence and disappearance, memory and forgetting. The Krenychi he photographed no longer exists. The village itself still physically exists, but it is completely different. All that remains is the story captured by the photographer’s camera.

The exhibition features about 100 photographs: landscapes, portraits, scenes of festivities and everyday life. It is an attempt to hear the voice of the past, to see those who "were here," and to preserve their presence in collective memory.

This is another series of works from the Master’s photo archive, prepared by Yuriy Marushchenko with the assistance of Valeriy Miloserdov.

The exhibition will run from September 26 to October 9 at RA Gallery, 32 Bohdana Khmelnytskoho Street, Kyiv.