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Background information
"The 'Malanka' festival is a folklore ritual celebrated on January 14, the old New Year in the Julian calendar, by ethnic Romanians in western Ukraine. It is about driving away winter and reviving spring, a well-known custom that recalls the return of Persephone in Greek mythology. The photographer visited the town of Krasnoilsk twice (2019 and 2020) to photograph the local Malanka.
Content
Through the gaze of Yelena YEMCHUK, we are immersed in the in-between, where her subjects always experience a kind of metamorphosis. Like her other works, 'Malanka' is personal, feminine, surreal and surrounded by a certain magic.
Additional information
The photo book 'Malanka' is already the sixth photo book by the Ukrainian-American artist." (slightly adapted publisher's text, © Edition Patrick Frey, 2024)
About Ukrainian-American photographer, Yelena YEMCHUK
Yemchuk was born in Kyiv and emigrated to the USA at the age of eleven. In her work, she always creates oscillating intermediate worlds in which fiction and reality become blurred. She skillfully brings together the things that inspire and define her: the glamorous cinema of the 1960s, the social and architectural landscapes of the post-Soviet world, her Eastern European origins and her everyday life in New York.