Book “The Road Beyond” with Kominek

Sample Pages

Ruslan’s debut monograph The Road Beyond (Kominek, 2022), created in collaboration with the Ukrainian filmmaker and poet Iryna Tsilyk, documents a decade of life in Ukraine (2010–2020) through intimate photographs and poetry.

The Road Beyond is a book of peace, says photographer Ruslan Hrushchak about his work. The timing of the publication of his pictures and the poems of Iryna Tsilyk creates a stark irony: the unrest in eastern Ukraine, which has gone on for years, has turned into open war.

Hrushchak, born in Ukraine, has been living in Germany for 20 years. Tsilyk lives and works in Kyiv; by juxtaposing their outstanding art they have created a deeply inspiring and moving book of poems and pictures about the people of Ukraine. In depicting culture and human life it captures the tension between the transient and the eternal in a highly visual and poetic way. The meaning of this volume with its carefully selected portraits, photographs and poems transcends time and cultures.

The map of the hiking trail is quite familiar: a forest, a clearing, a hill, a pit.

You focus your camera

but suddenly

the familiar terrain changes rapidly

…

The road is paved with photographs and poetry. We step on it and step into a world that shines through the pictures and poems, in longing, memory, hope. On our own Road Beyond.

…

everything jumps around,

spreads out in all directions,

flees in confusion from settled places,

searches for rescue: this way? or that? which one‘s better?

Exhibition in Kunstraum Potsdam, 2023