In her artistic practice, Elena is concerned with questioning religion, tradition, the construction of history and the consequences of Soviet colonial past. She works with topics of fragility of human bodies, death and war.
Unlike many great masters of humanistic photography, Elena’s take is not about revealing “the problem”, but about highlighting the beauty of the vulnerable and providing the subjects with agency they might not have been aware of. As a photographer who works in the field (and not in the studio or her laptop) she comes to her subject very closely with her short lens. You can almost feel this absence of distance in the images, as if you could just stretch your hand and touch them. Yet, there’s no intrusion or exploitation in her work. Her gaze is the gaze of curiosity, the gaze of care, the gaze of admiration. In the end, it is the gaze of a woman who is very present, brave and subjective, but very humane.
The culmination of this artistic approach came this year with the series New Borders of My Body. For a year Elena has been visiting (and still is) the Superhumans Centre where she shoots war veterans and civilians with amputations undergoing aquatic rehabilitation. Immersed in water, the limbless bodies of (mostly) men acquire a new potency of a free, painless movement that is lost in other dimensions. The shimmering colours of water provide them with a protective veil—not hiding, but rather dressing them in dignity and grace. Elena’s camera is there to allow them to see what they feel and allow us (those who are not there) to feel what we see.
“This project traces a metamorphosis that begins in trauma—the loss of limbs through war—and continues in water, the primordial environment of healing and transformation. There, the body can once again feel whole: it is defined no longer by loss, but by its ability to adapt, to move, to return to itself in a new form. Water becomes both maternal womb and mirror, dissolving outlines and shaping new borders. This project tells of a deeply intimate metamorphosis—the rediscovery of one’s own body, the making of a new map of the self.
Yet this metamorphosis is also collective. Just as the body grieves its lost parts, the country bears its own amputation—territories of Ukraine remain occupied. Still, we keep moving, finding ways to live with pain, to stand, to speak. In these works, the body becomes a site of resistance and vulnerability at once, an attempt to find a new wholeness within what remains unhealed,” comments Elena Subach.
The show takes place as part of the KEY WORK: Art Grants programme by RIBBON International in partnership with Jam Factory Art Center.
