Ukrainian photographer Marta Syrko's ongoing “sculpture series” project is a continuation of earlier work where the human body played first fiddle. She has consistently photographed athletic and muscular bodies, as well as those wrinkled with old age, with the same sensitivity, regarding them as physical objects made of flesh, skin, color, and texture: a material that can be shaped as clay. Flesh can tense up or loosen, decompose, change shape and contour, remaining, however, what is Syrko's starting point—a material to form into beautiful sculptures.
The new “sculpture series,” consisting of photographs of Ukrainians seriously injured during the war, are not easy to look at. The first glimpse is harsh, and it is a challenge to keep on gazing, not to look away. It is physically painful to see the war-wounded, disfigured, dismembered, or heavily burned bodies. It takes effort to let our eyes wander the surface of the image, to enter the territory of bodies that we may not be used to looking at. Some are shown without the prosthetic limbs that soldiers often end up needing after they serve—if the limb is lacking, we see the void. Others present their mechanical limbs as part of their new bodies and newly altered lives. Syrko confronts us with the disfigured elements, hands, back, thighs, tibias, and cheeks: often we never see the face of the model.
Each photograph published on Syrko's Instagram—the main platform for sharing her work—is accompanied by the model's story: how and where they were wounded, which parts of their body they cover, as well as how we can help. There is a social aspect to these works, clearly, but the question remains, why did Syrko decide to show us these war-altered bodies in such a way?
All bodies in Ukraine are war bodies now and are thus imbued with new cultural meanings and identities. In her attempt to aestheticize them and make them visually compelling, Syrko invokes beautification treatments in the way that bodies are lit, or has models recline in poses resembling classical or neoclassical sculptures. And they do indeed evoke associations with classical sculptures: they are fit and muscular as much as they are memberless. Another echo is of Old Masters’ paintings of gods and heroes, presenting at times both the beauty of these bodies and their excruciating pain. With this series, Syrko pursues an exquisite attention to detail: the texture of the flesh is of more interest than the overall positioning of the body or composition.
Syrko emphasizes that her models struggle not only with the physical pain and the difficulties of newly disabled life, but also with the private grief of facing the changes to their once conventionally attractive bodies. The artist ultimately aims to sculpt them into new forms of beauty, and to help us—viewers, witnesses, and recipients—habituate our eyes when we may want to avert.
Mere documentation of war wounds would be a perfunctory interpretation of Syrko's “sculptures.” I propose that we consider them within the wider phenomena of war bodies in today's Ukraine, with multifarious signifiers pertaining to the physical suffering of people and their invaded land, to emotional distress, and to the body that has lost legal and political rights, a body raided. Syrko tells us too about the estrangement and alienation of normative guidelines for humanness. “Sculptures” are traces of the bodies that will now be present in Ukraine: we should consider them carefully not only in how we look at them but in the future struggle to rebuild cities and villages viable for all the sorts of bodies that will inhabit them.
