Video: Caro & Kaspar | Music: „For the Penguins“ by David Allred, published by Erased Tapes Music, courtesy of Erased Tapes Records Ltd, erasedtapes.com

Glückliche Fälle

Yevgenia Belorusets | Claudia Dathe

Glückliche Fälle, Photo: Kaspar Lerch

Jury’s comment

“What cannot be measured?
- my smile
- your caring
- our mutual misunderstanding”

These portraits of mostly women between Kiev and Donbass are impressive and stubborn, full of headstrong observations and wowful statements. They are based on encounters and conversations from several research trips, but are literarily shaped, hyper-realistic, not documentary and contrasted with photos. The concise density shows what the latency of the occupation and uprising does to the lives of florists, sisters and beauty salon customers – those forgotten by history. According to the preface, the title of Yevgenia Belorusets’s book was originally THE HISTORY OF TAXES. Fragments of the Work ‘The Early History of Humankind.’ We have nothing less before us than this fantastic endeavor and its consequential failure, outstandingly translated by Claudia Dathe.
— Daniela Seel, jury

Yevgenia Belorusets , © Olga Tsybulska

Author: Yevgenia Belorusets

Yevgenia Belorusets is a photographer, artist and writer. She lives in Kiev and Berlin, working at the intersection of art, media and society. Belorusets is involved in a number of cultural and political initiatives.

Claudia Dathe , © Björn Hänssler

Translator: Claudia Dathe

Claudia Dathe studied translation and business administration in Leipzig, Pyatigorsk (Russia) and Kraków. After working abroad for many years in Kazakhstan and Ukraine, she worked at the Slavic Seminar at the University of Tübingen from 2009 to 2016. Since March 2016 she is head of the cultural advisory center of the Bürgerstiftung Jena. She regularly conducts European cultural and civil society projects, manages translation workshops and translates literature from Russian and Ukrainian by, among others, Andrey Kurkov, Serhiy Zhadan, Ostap Slyvynsky and Yevgenia Belorusets.