Lavra Art Gallery
The MYPH exhibition took place at Kyiv’s Lavra Art Gallery. I shared the curatorial work with the collective’s founder, Serhiy Melnychenko.
← Curator
Means of Influence
A group exhibition by the Mykolaiv photographic collective MYPH, founded by Serhiy Melnychenko. Its thematic sections explore how individual identity takes shape within a creative group and a post-industrial city.
Photography and community
Between religion and the rave
Works by Nataliia Shcherbyna and Olesia Tyshchuk juxtaposed religious imagery and the body. Other photographs addressed nightlife, detachment and the search for identity.
Community as a setting
MYPH grew from a teaching practice in Mykolaiv. In his Untitled interview, Melnychenko named the Lavra exhibition among the collective’s significant shows, bringing individual voices into a shared public space.
About the project
Means of Influence presents the photographic collective MYPH, whose participants came together in Mykolaiv under the guidance of Serhiy Melnychenko. Different ages and backgrounds coexist within a common approach, producing a broad range of subjects, tools and genres.
Organised into thematic sections, the exhibition considers the collective as a space in which each participant shapes others while developing an individual practice. The emphasis shifts from the city’s objects and surroundings towards the social relationships through which a person becomes visible.
The project asks what it means to be oneself within a creative community and within the pressures of a post-industrial city. Photography becomes a means of negotiating that tension: a way to register one’s presence while recognising the influences that make it possible.