This Thursday night, October 13, 2016 was held at the School Of Visual Arts, in New York, the annual reception of the W. Eugene Smith Grant. In the usual and moving atmosphere of this mythic ceremony, at the School of Visual Arts, Polish photographer Justyna Mielnikiewicz was awarded this year, winning at the same time an endowment of $ 30 000.
The following text is a presentation of her work entitled A Diverging Frontier: Russia and its Neighbors.
December 2016 will mark the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Soviet Union, when fifteen Soviet republics became independent countries. Some of them remained within Russia’s sphere of influence, while others like Georgia or Ukraine keep trying to break away and become part of Western Europe. My project is a portrait of modern Russia reflected in the experiences of its neighbors and of Russians living outside the border, in particular.
Vladimir Putin’s speech in Moscow announcing the annexation of Crimea on March 18, 2014 talked about millions of people who went to bed in one country and awoke in different ones after the USSR’s collapse. Overnight, they became ethnic minorities in the former Union republics, making the Russian nation “one of the biggest, if not the biggest ethnic group in the world to be divided by borders“.
There is a significant (counted in millions) ethnic Russian population in most post-Soviet states whose political positions vary from country to country. In my final part of the work, made with support of the Eugene Smith Grant, I will explore how these people have formed their national loyalties in the context of history, religion, family ties and language as citizens of those countries, which re-emerged after Soviet Union fell apart.
My project explores borders as ever-changing spheres of influence that overlap physical borders marked on the map. It is a continuation of a large body of work I have been putting together in the Caucasus and Ukraine since 2001. The Eugene Smith Memorial Fund support will allow me to complete the work and present an in-depth and comprehensive visual guide to the region 25 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Justyna Mielnikiewicz
Other 2016 Recipients:
– Smith Fellowship Recipient ($5000): Oscar B. Castillo, for Our War, Our Pain. The Debacle of a Dream. (Nuestra Guerra, Nuestro Dolor).
– Howard Chapnick Grant Recipient ($5000): Liza Faktor, for Practicing Transmedia in Photojournalism.
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