Photojournalist Oksana Parafeniuk was six months pregnant when Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022. In the three years since, she and her husband, also a photojournalist, have lived with their toddler son in Kyiv, a city heavily impacted by the war. Much of Parafeniuk’s documentary work from this period highlights Ukrainian women and post-invasion, stories that are often overlooked in the dominant media narratives.
The resulting images tell a nuanced story and are presented here in dialogue with family photographs of life under the invasion, as well as works from a series experimenting with embroidery on some of these images. The series, titled War Threads, uses camouflage-colored threads to pierce paper as a metaphor for how Russian influence has penetrated every aspect of daily life in Ukraine. Through these interventions, the artist references the constant interruptions of air raid sirens, blackouts, and explosions, underscoring how family memories are forever altered by war.
War Threads was on display in ICP’s Incubator Space on the first floor through August 19.
International Center of Photography: How did this project come together over the last few years?
Oksana Parafeniuk: The exhibition came together as War Threads, which was initially a name for this embroidery project that I started. As you know, in Ukraine, there has been a full-scale invasion launched by Russia since 2022. And when it started, I was six months pregnant. Although my husband and I are photojournalists, the experience was a bit different for us because we had to, first and foremost, take care of our child.
War Threads allowed me some space and time to reflect about what's going on with our lives. I was looking for a distraction from this harsh reality. And about two years ago, I came up with this idea to buy camouflage colored threads and artificially add this layer of war to the printed photos on the paper in black and white. And embroidery, in its way, makes you slow down and sit for a long time, which was helping me find a meditative space in a way, and not look at my phone all the time. Phones are ever-present in our daily life, since we also use it for alerts on air raid sirens and tracking where missiles and drones are being targeted.
Looking back at the family photos felt weird because they look mostly as if our son just has a normal, happy childhood. While at the same time it's marked by the war. There are missile and drone attacks, really loud air raid sirens. We go to shelter often at night. And I struggled with visualizing this feeling using just documentary images. I also felt that I just wanted to get away a little bit from pure photojournalism.
ICP: Can you talk to me about some of the choices that you made for the selection at ICP’s Incubator Space exhibition?
OP: It was all done together with Sara Ickow, ICP’s Associate Director of Exhibitions. She played a big role in curating and selecting the images because I've never seen the space in person.
One part is this complex, embroidery project War Threads. It is a project in progress which, through my personal family photographs, aims to reflect on how war has pierced all aspects of life in Ukraine. While things often seem normal on the surface, our humble routines are affected by war in myriad ways. Anxiety, sleep deprivation, explosions, blackouts, and the nauseating sound of the air raid siren are all woven into the fabric of our daily lives. I offered Sara photographs from my family archive to sort of help make sense of the embroideries in some way.
As well as some photographs of women that I did in Ukraine – of medics, fighters, miners and many other women. It's about how war basically went through the life of each of these women and changed it in a very fundamental way. Even though these images might seem quite different, this is about Ukrainian women and each of their lives. I’m also a Ukrainian woman and by telling my personal story it hopefully gives a slightly wider outlook on my family and maybe explains a bit more to audiences what it's like to live here.
And it was Sara's idea to print embroideries really big because in real life, they're just standard Letter paper size. But then scanning them and printing them to fit the space made them look more captivating.
ICP: What led you to combine photo and embroidery this way?
OP: I was interested in combining creative ways in photography for a while. Straightforward photos are sometimes not enough to reveal the complexity of what I want to say, or the complexity of reality. My mom has always done a lot of sewing and knitting, my grandmother does a lot of embroidery, so it was just always part of my life. And when I thought of using embroidery in my project, I felt like it could be the right choice.
I remember I was once at this exhibition in London some years ago. And I saw the project by Joanna Choumali, a photographer from Cote D’Ivoire, it was about her hometown. It also combined photography and embroidery and it was just so beautiful. It gave you so much more emotion through the photography and it stayed in my head. Jenny Matthews also did a project about women in Afghanistan, but she printed the photographs on actual cotton fabric, and then she embroidered.
When you walk around Kyiv or travel in many other cities, even those quite remote from the frontline, you see a lot of presence of military — people in uniforms, military vehicles. You see these camouflage, green colors, and it’s a very obvious presence of the war. So I decided to use this in the work. I went to a store and I bought all shades of greens I could see. When my mom came over and saw how much thread I’d bought, she said, “You bought so much thread, you can embroider for the rest of your life with it!” because I didn't realise exactly how much I needed. Now I have this whole huge pile of this thread!
In the end, I printed photos on this thick, archival paper. The process is very slow. When you embroider on fabric, it's soft, and much faster. When you do it on the paper, it’s much slower, first I need to pierce all the individual holes, and then take a needle and carefully start putting a thread in each hole separately. I looked at a lot of projects for reference, and I also looked at traditional Ukrainian embroidery.
For me, stitching camouflage-colored embroidery on our family photographs is my exploration of what it’s like to have family memories forever altered by war. War, like a needle piercing the paper, has punctured every aspect of our existence.
We will never remember this time without a war, you know?
ICP: As they interact with the images, what do you hope the audience will experience?
OP: I think my project intends to show what it's like to live here in Ukraine, and how war penetrated and changed lives of so many people, and in particular women.
When people are not living in the middle of what we are living through, you consume most of the information from the media, and it's often about rather dramatic events, a lot about soldiers fighting, images of destroyed buildings or fires and injured people. And so that shapes your understanding of the war, which is all incredibly important of course. But there are also more quiet moments, stories of ordinary lives affected by the war in very difficult ways. It’s about not sleeping all night while sheltering in the subway because of a missile attack, and then taking your child to the kindergarten. It’s about children studying in basements of the schools for safety and so many more daily moments affected by war.
And the part of the exhibition about the Ukrainian women focuses on telling stories of Ukrainian women, how their in their roles and lives changed in the times of war. My goal was to portray a multitude of women’s experiences in Ukraine taking on new jobs as: soldiers, volunteers, athletes, activists, women who were killed and who are absent from their families, students and surgeons.
ICP: What are you working on currently?
OP: I’m mostly working on assignments now covering news and feature stories in Ukraine. The last few months were particularly stressful in Ukraine. We've worked quite a lot with my husband and there was a lot of horrific missile and drone attacks on Kyiv. And having a 3 year old increases levels of anxiety even more, so we were trying to take a bit of time away from Kyiv. I also hope to do more embroidery on family images soon, this project is not finished yet.
Oksana Parafeniuk (she/her) is an independent photographer based in Kyiv, Ukraine, where she is exploring the manifestations of human resilience and dignity among people facing hardships.
In addition to her personal projects, Oksana has worked with and published her work in The Washington Post, The New York Times, NPR, NBC News, Libération and many others. She took part in multiple group exhibitions in Ukraine, as well as in Germany, the Netherlands, France, the United States and other countries. She is a member of Women Photograph and The Journal Collective.