The Wall: Witness to the War in Ukraine

“My home is destroyed.”
“I no longer have a home.”
“I don’t know what’s going on with my home.”

These are phrases I often hear from Internally Displaced Persons (IDP’s) and refugees who live in subways, schools, and temporary shelters. They are tired of being guests in their own country. But they have no choice, as their homes have been completely destroyed by Russian aggression. They move from place-to-place seeking a home.

Traveling my country and photographing how people's lives have fundamentally changed and continue to change, I sought a different language than documentary or reportage. I found this language in a series of artistic photographs. I believe it is necessary to talk about the war in all possible languages.

These photographs, my visual language, are details from walls of residential buildings, burnt by Russian shelling. The project began rather subconsciously in spring 2022, in North Saltivka, in an area where all the residential buildings were destroyed by Russian shelling, I was coming into the burned apartments one by one and documenting what I see,

I made my first pictures in the driveway of a high-rise building before coming into someone's apartment. I touched the wall there, and it touched me. I felt so bad to be there as a stranger without permission. But whose permission? Who lived here? Are they alive? What happened when it was bombed? I also have seen their unmade beds, dishes left on the table, pictures of those who are alive or not, and I will never know.

And so I began this project to keep the memories alive. These pictures follow the path of the war in eastern Ukraine including Kharkiv region, Mykolaiv region, Dnipropetrovsk region, Kyiv region, Donetsk Region. I want to remind people of those desolate, destroyed places, where each wall has its own memory.

Now we are all like those walls, burned by war, covered with scars and forever changed.

--Іва Сідаш / Iva Sidash

About the Artist