Photography · Conflict · Memory

OKRAYINA

The 7 borders of war

How does war reshape a country? What wounds does it leave behind? Since 2019 I have been travelling across Ukraine looking for answers. Here are some of them. Seven human borders that appear on no map. From the trenches to the home front.

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Reporting published in:
The Telegraph El Confidencial The Guardian CNN Die Zeit The Kyiv Independent
A woman walks past a burnt-out armoured vehicle on a street in Ukraine, in front of a building destroyed by the war.

The project

“There is no single border in this war. There are seven. Human and invisible, each one draws the line between life and death differently.”
0selected photographs
0cities
0Ukrainian regions
0years of work on the ground

The journey

7 borders

Okrayina is a documentary photography and war reporting project that crosses seven human borders: terror, life, pain, faith, exodus, nationhood and childhood.

The project is built around a touring exhibition, a book and an educational programme of talks that brings war and its consequences into the classroom. Three ways of preserving memory — the eighth border, the one that runs through all the others — of building on it, and of giving younger audiences the tools to tell fact from noise, verify what they are told and make sense of the reality around them.

Lviv Kyiv Sumy Kharkiv Odesa Mykolaiv Kherson Dnipro Avdiivka Bakhmut Pokrovsk Kramatorsk Sloviansk Lyman Zaporiyia Velyka Dymerka Vinnytsia Khmelnytskyi Borodyanka Zhytomyr Chernihiv Popasna Svitlodarsk Mariupol Kostiantynivka Sviatohirsk Kupiansk Kryvyi Rih Uzhhorod Pavlohrad Ternopil Uman Bucha Poltava Pryluky Hlukhiv Kurakhove Mala Tokmachka Orikhiv Niu-York Dobropillia Oleksandrivka Lozova Izium Velyka Oleksandrivka Kropyvnytskyi
Cities and regions covered between 2019 and 2026
Portrait of a Ukrainian soldier lit by a red headlamp in the dark.
An ambulance beside a badly wounded man lying on the ground, with another man coming down a fire escape.
A mother and her baby reflected in the window of an evacuation bus.

Okrayina continues beyond these images

Exhibition

A touring show that carries the seven borders into physical space.

Discover → Book

The publishing project that brings together photography, reporting and poetry.

Discover → Education

A programme that takes the testimony of war and media literacy into the classroom.

Discover →

Make Okrayina possible

We are looking for partners to take the exhibition, the book and its education programme to new audiences.

Host the project Galleries, festivals, cultural centres and universities Sponsor Brands, foundations, media outlets and institutions

Prefer to talk directly? bexgruntu@gmail.com