Karine Zenja Versluis

For the project Debaltsevo, Where Are You?, the Dutch photographer Karine Zenja Versluis set out to find her grandmother’s birthplace, a city in eastern Ukraine. Her grandmother was deported to Germany as a forced laborer during the Second World War. Later, she later moved to the Netherlands.

Versluis originally wanted to travel with her grandmother to Debaltseve, as the town is known in English. However, the escalation of the war in eastern Ukraine in 2014 made this trip impossible. The planned trip turned into a years-long search for traces of a place she could not visit.

The work combines a number of different times and perspectives. These include slides taken by Versluis’s father during a family visit to Debaltseve in the early 1970s. They have become an important link to a place that the artist herself could never get to know.

In addition, we encounter the artist’s grandmother. An old family photo, memories of her childhood, and the story of her deportation during the Second World War form the highly personal core of the project.

A third layer only developed later. Versluis spent time with three women who were forced to leave Debaltseve in 2015. Her photographs capture everyday moments in the lives of these women and their families—connecting her grandmother’s story with present-day experiences of loss, relocation, and new beginnings.

The result is not a cohesive family portrait. Much of the story remains uncertain or out of reach, and it is precisely this that becomes an important aspect of the piece. It becomes clear that memories deal with more than just what has been preserved. They also tell of what is missing.

This may feel familiar: the deeper we delve into a family’s history, the more gaps we find. Some events are well documented. Others only survive in the form of stories or individual pictures.

Versluis doesn’t try to close these gaps. Instead, she makes them visible. This creates a space of memory in which the past and the present connect. Her grandmother’s story intersects with the experiences of other people who were also forced to leave their homeland.