Yelena Yemchuk’s photos of a surreal folk ritual in pre-war Ukraine

When Yelena Yemchuk encountered pictures of a riotous folk celebration called Malanka held every year in a distant part of Ukraine, she felt immediately drawn to the otherwordly ritual. The Ukrainian-American visual artist made the pilgrimage to Krasnoilsk – a rural settlement in the west of the country – in 2019 and 2020 to photograph the celebrations observed every year on January 13 and 14 (New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day in accordance with the Julian calendar). In a conversation over email, she tells us, “I’ve always been attracted to mystical, dreamy, strange places and events with intangible time and space.”

“The story of Malanka is based on a folk tale pre-Christian origins,” explains Yemchuk. “God’s daughter, Mother Earth, has two children – Moon and Spring – and, like the version of the myth of Hades and Persephone, the devil desires Spring’s presence in the underworld and abducts her. While she is away Earth is dark and there is no springtime. Malanka is the celebration of her release from the underworld and the beginning of spring again.” 

As with her previous bodies of work, the collection of pictures she amassed in the “dreamy setting” of Krasnoilsk feels like an incantation – magical and enigmatic, cast from her obsessions with “mystery, dreams, parallel existences, love, connection to others, faces, and energy”. The air is glowing with freezing fog, as if the cold itself is a kind of light. The winter sun is low and the shadows are long. Ready to say farewell to winter and welcome springtime, the villagers and their animals are out on the snowy streets, regaled in furs, headscarves, colourful embroidered textiles, masks and costumes, rich with symbolism and history. 

For Yemchuk, Malanka is an extension of her interest in the past and the present co-existing in the same shared space. This spectral sense of the past haunting – or living in – the present permeates many of her pictures. “I am a spiritual person, I always felt like an old soul,” she says. “Time to me is not linear and that’s very present in all my work. I’m very inspired by fairytales, stories of the past, and places you feel history just by the energy of the earth beneath your feet.”

The trips were fraught with misadventures which, ultimately, only add to the magic of the experience and the images. She recalls, “It was a very wild adventure, especially the first trip in 2019. I went with two of my girlfriends from Odesa and it was a long train journey and then a car ride to northern Bucovina. We really didn’t plan very well, we had no place to stay and there are no hotels. Our one contact was the Mayor of the village. It was so cold and we ended up spending our first night there in a Tuberculoses sanitarium, it was kind of nuts. But the night was incredible, we mostly spent the holiday following the Mayor’s family. There are five families in the village that celebrate and each one has different costumes. On New Year’s Day they all gather in the village square after the night, singing, dancing and lots of drinking.”

Given that these portraits predate the Russian invasion of Ukraine, has Yemchuk’s relationship with this body of work changed? Revisiting the pictures now, do they have a different emotional charge? “All my work in Ukraine feels different to me now. I’ve been shooting in Ukraine since 1996, it’s my home, my inspiration and my heart,” she says. “Everything I’ve done there so far has become much more special and precious to me. I feel very blessed that I have been  able to go home so many times and do all these different projects there and tell stories of my beautiful country and its people.”

Ritual can be healing, not just an antidote to the worse side-effects of modernity, but also a time for reflection and deep-thought. The practice of making space for ritual, in a communal and individual sense, seems increasingly urgent. This imperative feels very present in Malanka. “There are so few places in the world that still value and hold on to ancient traditions,” Yemchuk says. “I think it's so important that we hold on to these spiritual and mystical traditions, these stories of the past. We need them as individuals and as societies to stay in touch with our spirits of past and present,  to have so magic in our lives. It’s so sacred.”

Yelena Yemchuk’s Malanka is published by Patrick Frey Editions and is available to pre-order here now.

Yemchuk’s booksigning will take place on Thursday, April 25 2024, 6-8.30pm at London’s Claire de Rouen