Olesia Saienko

Olesia Saienko is a photographer and a visual storyteller from Ukraine. Holder of a Master's degree in Psychology. Started to work as a photojournalist and freelancer in 2017. Olesia is engaged in documentary and conceptual photography and maintains a documentary photo diary. Her practice is centered around fiction, documentary, and post-truth, which is a logical continuation of her journalistic job. By manipulating the viewer to create confusion, she reflects on the closely related subjects of archive and memory.

Member of Ukrainian Women Photographers Organization. Her photos have been published in PHROOM, Reporters.media, F-Stop magazine, Zaborona, Kiosk of democracy, Liberation. Olesia lives and works in Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine.

Education:
2019 - Visual storytelling school (NGO Center for Visual Education in Lutsk)
2019 - Internship at Reporters.media on Media's inter-editorial JEP exchange program
2019 - School of conceptual and art photography (MYPHART) 2019

Exhibitions:
2022 - group exhibition "Imagine" in Otte 1(Eckernförde, Germany)
2022 - 2nd International Art Fair ART COMPENSA / Ukrainian female artists on War / Art Compensa Exhibition Space, Vilnius, Lithuania
2022 - group exhibition "Beauty of Ukraine / That which is at risk." in Gallery Art Factory Flox (Kirshau, Germany)
2022 - group exhibition "In the name of freedom" in Chausee 36 Berlin (Berlin, Germany)
2021 - group exhibition "100 women" (Ukrainian women photographers organization) in Municipal Gallery (Kharkiv, Ukraine)
2021 - group exhibition ''Mud'' in Detector Gallery (Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine)
2020 - personal exhibition "Want to know a secret" in the Asortymentna Kimnata (Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine)
2020 - group project "Anticipation+Immunity" in MSUMK (Lutsk, Ukraine)2020 - group exhibition MYPH graduates online show
2020 - online exhibition "Those alone" visual diaries during quarantine in the gallery COME IN (Kharkiv, Ukraine)
2020 - exhibition from the project The Print Swap (by Feature Shoot) at Berlin Blue Gallery (Berlin, Germany)
2019 - Photo Kyiv Fair 2019 (section "Ukrainian street photography") (Kyiv, Ukraine)
2019 - "Stop Frame" at the Green Theater (within the Odessa International Film Festival with the assistance of the UCF) (Odesa, Ukraine)

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Olesia Saienko

Olesia`s photo projects

Want to know a secret

The project has the form of a detective investigation, superimposed on reflections on growing up and related physiological and psychological processes.

I am taking the role of a detective and constructing the plot through the intuitive following of the frame, not knowing about the end of the story in advance.

The starting point of the series is an archival children's video, which involuntarily suggests a sense of suspense. Something has to happen to the little girl in the frame, and she doesn't know anything about it yet. Then the story unfolds through a series of photographs, which with their cinematic aesthetics, increase the feeling of anxiety. The locations, objects, and people captured in these black-and-white images seem to build causal relationships, but we don't see the girls in the video there. Probably, the investigation is conducted around her disappearance.

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