You Just Missed Her

I was born in 1989 in Minsk. Three years later, from a Soviet provincial city it changed into the capital of sovereign Belarus and my family changed their citizenship by moving to Moscow. In 2016, I returned to my birthplace with a camera driven by the question: what would my life have been like if we had stayed? The slow pace of change in Belarus facilitated my imaginings. The setting for people's coming of age in Minsk today to a great extent resembles what I abandoned over two decades ago. Navigating between personal memories and contemporary realities, I tried to envision a female account of growing up in the city by photographing girls and women aged from 3 to 30. Shuffling through infinite possible twists in a story of mine that never happened, I grasped fragments of the ones that I encountered in its place. Eventually, what appeared to be an array of loose threads came together in a tapestry that misses out myself but fills in what I have missed, encompassing in an intricate way the past, the present, and the promise of a future.