Masha Pryven (Ukraine, Germany)

BIO//

Masha Pryven was raised in Luhansk, Ukraine and studied in Kyiv. A Fulbright scholarship recipient, she holds a M.A. degree in Comparative Literature from Washington University in St. Louis, USA. In 2014, she moved to Berlin, Germany, and her family fled from Eastern Ukraine to Kyiv. She received photographic training at the Ostkreuz School of Photography in Berlin. Her first photography book was published by Edition Frölich in 2022, Berlin. Her recent collaborative archive project “See what I see” appears in the anthology “Collaboration: A Potential History of Photography», edited by Wendy Ewald, Susan Meiselas and others, Thames and Hudson, 2023.

Masha is an artist working primarily with photography and an educator. In her work, she explores the relationship between the public and the private, and she is interested in the forms of co-authorship and collaboration.

PROJECT//

During the residency in Narva, she would like to work with the idea of artifacts and treat things sourced from the street as those which have cultural and historical significance. She will be working with the youths of Narva in a series of sessions and letting them find objects that will help them create artistic reflections about Narva.

In a nutshell, she intends to create collaborative artistic portraits of the town – photo books, in which found materials function as photos. The final results in the form of material objects would work as artifacts of visual anthropology, created by the young city dwellers themselves, from their perspective.