Time ‘sometimes abandons her watch distracted by monstrosities’—writes Joyelle McSweeney in a twenty-page poem pulsating through the body of Yana Kononova’s photobook Radiations of War (FOTODOK x XYZ Books, 2025). The publication brings together images made since the start of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, depicting the way violence seeps into the earth. It seems that time abandoned the book, distracted by what she could see in photographs. Yet, she is central to the whole project, as the artist questions: how does disaster continue after impact? And how does the land keep on mutating? 

The mutation of an image that I am looking at is folded into the dust jacket of the book, wrapped around its soft cover. It stands in contrast to the rest of the crisp photographs contained in this book, all shot with the precision of a medium format camera. Depredation, on the contrary, creates a turbid visual environment, in which I drown, loose sight, and suffocate. Kononova talks about the collage form as a hallucinatory space. Kononova talks about a collage form as a hallucinatory space. Through feverish eyes, such an image lets clarity emerge from the shivers: in direct photographs one has to look for details, in collages—the details prolapse themselves from a pictorial plane onto a viewer. 

The image throws out of itself remnants of an aircraft named Mriya, Ukrainian for ‘dream’, destroyed in the first days of invasion. Originally designed to transport cargo, its last flight transported almost 90 tons of COVID-19 test kits from China to Denmark. Out of the image spills the Dnipro River—water here representing the consequences of the destruction of the Kakhovka Dam in the Zaporizhzhia region, one of the most horrific ecocides in modern history. Fused together, these separate scenes make a symbolic whole that signals the beginning of a new epoch, marking the shift from a pandemic that evoked collective attempts to survival, to a time of global destruction. This image will stand the test of time, but will time stand the test of this image? 

YANA KONONOVA is a Ukrainian artist working with camera-based material practices, writing, and expanded print techniques. Her work approaches landscape as a form of historical articulation and a sensitive terrain within ecocritical and speculative frameworks. She explores the tactile qualities of the photographic image, navigating the threshold between material process and visual representation. She holds a PhD in Sociology and a diploma in Art & Curatorial Practice from the New Center for Research & Practice. Kononova is the recipient of the Bird in Flight Prize for Emerging Photography (2019) and the Hariban Award presented by Benrido (2022), and was nominated by FOTODOK to the FUTURES talent network (2023). Her work has been supported by grants and fellowships from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts (2023), the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen (IWM, 2024), and Ribbon International (2025). Her work has been widely exhibited internationally in Ukraine and abroad.

DARIA TUMINAS is a freelance curator. Since 2019, she has been curating at FOTODOK, as well as developing exhibitions at the likes of Foam Museum Amsterdam, EXPOSED Torino Foto Festival, Les Rencontres d’Arles, WORM etc.. Between 2017 and 2019, she worked as the head of the Unseen Book Market at Unseen Amsterdam. Daria contributed to a number of photobook-related reflections as a writer, editor or curator. She co-curated the symposium The Moving Page for Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum; guest-edited The PhotoBook Review #12 (Aperture, 2017) wrote a chapter for How We See: Photobooks by Women (10×10 Photobooks, 2018) and curated a number of photobook-related exhibitions, including Undercover, Reading a Photobook and Not Bliss But Relief. In 2022, Daria co-founded Growing Pains—a foundation publishing photobooks made with children in mind, supporting women and nonbinary artists.