Grinkevich Maria
Mendelssohn’s Wedding March
I'm crushed. You know… It’s shit to suddenly discover yourself being a single mother. That definitely wasn’t part of my wish list. It feels like you drive with the speed of 200 miles per hour and slam into the concrete wall. Everything’s falling apart. All your balanced and arranged life. It hurts.
Now you need to collect yourself piece by piece and learn how to live again. You start behaving like a bitch who would gnaw through one's throat in case anybody wants to offend your kids. You are in constant struggle with the outer world: with the society, the state, ex-husband’s relatives. However, the inner struggle is even tougher: shame, guilt, despair, self-pity and pity for children, resentment. You don't sleep, you binge eat, you work like a dog. At the same time, you create a special safety cocoon for your kid, the world just for two of you. His happy childhood is now the zone of your responsibility only.
You are invisible. The state now prefers not to see you. You can easily stay without means for existence. There are no social packages, no special conditions for neither nursery nor kindergarten. A single mother doesn’t exist in Kazakhstan.
My project is about single parenting. I want to tell about what we hoard in our independence. I started to shoot this project in August 2017, and it’s in progress.
As the result, the project will be presented as a photobook, an exhibition, and at online media. Work plan: I will conduct a series of interviews and photo shoots with the project’s participants. I will also collect children’s drawings that would relate to the subject of the project. Region: Kazakhstan. In the future, I plan to broaden the borders of the projects and work at Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and other countries of the Central Asia.
Grinkevich Maria
Grinkevich Maria (1981, Almaty, Kazakhstan) is a lawyer and a freelance photographer.
In her projects, she studies such themes as parenthood and childhood, as well as the biological, psychological and social aspects of motherhood. She has collaborated with the analytical media resourse 365info.kz.