Holes of Time

EDITION

2025, Shortlisted

school

MYPH School, Mykolaïv, Ukraine

links

@stusha_film ↗
antonenko.net ↗

Growing up without photographs of my own family shaped my relationship with memory. The absence of visual traces left a longing to preserve, to hold onto what remains. Photography became a way to reclaim the intangible — even when the memories weren’t mine. I discovered a collection of old negatives in an apartment my friends were renting. The film wasn’t destroyed, just poorly preserved — faded and fragile. I scanned the images, saved them, and began to explore them through imagination. I didn’t know these people, but I felt drawn to care for their presence. Using deformation — both physical and digital — I transformed the photographs into something new: not an act of destruction, but reinterpretation. These images speak of loss, erasure, and also presence — through absence. Holes of Time is a visual meditation on memory, empathy, and the invisible lives history often forgets. It is my way of giving form to silence, and of asking what it means to remember those we never knew. In a time of fractured truths, I see this act not only as preservation — but resistance.