Your name
Pavlo Borshchenko
Place of birth
Sumy, Ukraine
Place where you live now
Warsaw, Poland
3 words to describe you
independent, stubborn, sensitive
Why do you take pictures?
Express creative meaning, thoughts and creative reflection using photography.
Where do you get your inspiration?
A lot of different places: books (art and non-fiction), museums, news, history
Who are your influences?
Kharkiv School of Photography, selected personalities
What determines the subject matter you choose?
It's always a search for the realization of my thoughts and experiences, creation of collected images and rethinking of the past of my family and nowadays to do something and give it meaning.
What impact would you like your art to have?
This game with historical characters should force the deeper rethinking of the present and cause-and-effect relations. I would like the audience to understand the complexity of the multilayered perception of history and the present.
What artwork do you never get bored with?
I don't have one. I am interested in changing the focus of attention depending on the topics that excite me at each moment.
Is there anything you want to add?
I don't trust in standardized questionnaires. Art is too diverse for that ;)

Catch The Hero
Project statement

I'm originally from a small provincial Ukrainian city and grew up in the context of the end of the Soviet era. It influenced my search for identity, and visual conflicts of shifting epochs affected my consciousness.
This project reflects on the theme of layering different ideals and their loss. I study typical characters of the past epoch and try to reimagine them with the lost utopian meanings.
It feels like a game of heroes: I dress up as these idealistic characters I grew up with and try to imagine myself today in these dreamed up roles. But they haven't got power anymore, as it's only a mind game now.
This is a post-true story of an inner hero who tries to find himself between the tinsel of the past and present, whose life nowadays is full of the absurdity of abandoning history and twisted values.

See more by Pavlo Borshchenko in A Visual Dialogue in issue #8 and in collab:co-op in issue #9

@pavloborshchenko