Elena Subach

/ BIO

Elena Subach ( b. 19080 ) is a Ukrainian visual artist based in Lviv, working with photography, collage, and participatory practices. Her work explores the fragility of human life and its interconnectedness with memory, space, and the body. Through photography, she addresses themes of colonial legacy, war, loss, and recovery, tracing how major historical processes transform individual experience.
She began working with photography in 2012, joining the Lviv-based photography  community “5×5”. Since then, she has developed a number of long-term projects,including Grandmothers on the Edge of Heaven, Meteorite Berdychiv, Hidden, Chairs, City of Gardens, and New Borders of My Body. Following the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, her practice has increasingly combined authorial photography with participatory approaches. Since 2025, she has been the curator of the international Photovoice project Flowers in Wartime, developed as part of the research programme Caring to Survive, Surviving to Care. In 2025–2026, she has also worked as a mentor for the Living the War platform, supporting young photographers in exploring the ecological consequences of war through documentary photography.
Since 2024, a significant part of her practice has focused on working in Ukrainian rehabilitation centres, documenting the recovery of veterans and civilians following severe injuries. Through the projects New Borders of My Body and UNBROKEN, she explores how war transforms the perception of the human body and seeks to make the experiences of people living with acquired disabilities more visible in public space.
She is the recipient of the FUTURESPECTIVE 2025: Jury Choice award, winner of the Bird in Flight New East Photo Prize (2016), a Gaude Polonia scholarship holder (2019), and a Future Talents nominee (2019). Her work has been published in The Guardian, British Journal of Photography, and Süddeutsche Zeitung, and exhibited at Photo Elysée,Kunstforum Wien, Willy Brandt House, Palazzo Zuccari, and other European institutions. Her works are held in the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum (London), Neues Museum Nürnberg, MOCA NGO, and other collections.

/ ARTIST STATEMENT

My artistic practice is rooted in photography and explores the intersections of body, memory, and space, particularly within contexts shaped by trauma, rupture, and transition. I am drawn to how large-scale historical events – such as war – are inscribed into intimate, everyday experiences, shaping perception, materiality, and the sense of self. Before 2022, my work focused primarily on personal and intergenerational memory.
Several recurring themes run through my work: the province and the theme of death — both of human beings and of culture. My journey in photography began with travels through Ukraine in search of “miracles”, collecting the strange and the wild. During these journeys, I realised that when reality becomes too cruel to gaze at, people turn to legends. Myth and imagination transform trauma into an adventure, creating a palpable fourth dimension that displaces the ordinary order of things. In my projects, I construct the Myth of Silent Stories, using photography as a magnifying glass to give meaning to the small, the ephemeral and the inconspicuous.
Since 2022, as reality in Ukraine has become violently fractured, my practice has shifted from observing myths to actively participating in the rituals of preservation. The act of “fixing a damaged body” has transformed from a metaphor into an urgent material necessity. Whether documenting the tender safeguarding of cultural heritage in Hidden, or exploring the physical and psychological skin in New Borders of My Body, my focus remains on vulnerability and resilience.
In New Borders of My Body, the focus narrows down to the ultimate frontier of experience – the physical self. When the external world is threatened, the body becomes a site of renegotiation, accumulating collective trauma while also serving as a vessel for memory and metamorphosis. Through photography and collage, I examine how our bodies redefine their boundaries to accommodate both pain and the persistent, quiet miracle of living. Ultimately, I look into darkness not to surrender, but to find the precise contours of what remains intact.

/ IN RESIDENCE

In the context of this residency, I feel a strong need to work in two interconnected directions — one research-based and one deeply personal.

Firstly, I would like to expand my recent project, which focuses on veterans with amputations and the processes of prosthetic production and rehabilitation. During the residency, I would dedicate time to researching available open-access archives, as well as local archives in the cities where the program takes place. I am interested in collecting and working with visual materials that reflect the historical development of prosthetics and the shifting perceptions of people with limb loss.
Through this research, I would like to explore how these changes have been represented visually over time — how bodies, technologies, and ideas of wholeness and loss have been constructed, normalised, or marginalised. I see this as a way to connect personal and contemporary experiences of war in Ukraine with broader historical and cultural narratives, and to develop a new body of work that combines archival material with my own photographic practice.
At the same time, I feel an equally important need to reconnect with photography in a more intuitive and restorative way. After a long period of working with difficult and emotionally demanding subjects, I am experiencing a deep sense of fatigue. For this reason, I would also like to use the residency as a space to regain a sense of lightness and curiosity in my practice — to photograph during walks, to observe and to respond to the surrounding environment without a predefined goal.
For me, these two directions are not contradictory, but rather complementary. One is rooted in analysis and historical reflection, while the other allows space for emotional recovery and a renewed relationship with the act of seeing. I believe that this balance is essential for sustaining my practice in the long term.