Ukrzaliznytsia 2025

Ukrzaliznytsia documents Ukraine’s railways: from 2017–20, everyday travel before modernization, to a new 2025 series shaped by war, where trains became lifelines for evacuation and survival. This application focuses on presenting the recent works.

Provincial gigolos and leopard-clad ladies, rigorous businesswomen and young soldiers. You can meet all possible (and often impossible) kinds of characters while commuting on a train in Ukraine — or in my Ukrzaliznytsia project, named after the country’s one and only railroad transportation enterprise.

Ukrzaliznytsia—Ukraine’s national rail system—is the backbone for the country—it essential to the war effort, crucial to moving people, weapons, goods and supplies, as well as providing a diplomatic avenue and an economic lifeline.

I produced the series Ukrzaliznytsia between 2017–20 after graduating from Kharkiv State Academy of Railway Transport and gaining extensive experience as a train conductor along Ukraine’s national railways (Ukrzaliznytsia). The series arose from my desire to capture the essence of traveling across the country before full modernization of the network. At the time, I described the atmosphere aboard the trains as “erotic” in that the “notions of privacy and personal boundaries arrived as dim as the train light. The series was exhibited in 2018 inside the Kyiv Central Railway Station — in this way, the project came back to the area of its genesis and directly interacted with its own protagonists. The 2017-2020 Ukrzaliznytsia period was captured in the eponymous book which came out in 2021.

I return once again to Ukrzaliznytsia—this time in the winter months of early 2025, nearly three years into an ruthless war that has shifted the borders of the original network of the state rail system. Her engagement this time is graver—the Ukrainian railway has transformed into a conduit of forced relocation, displacement, emergency medical transport; into a channel of involuntary movement of individuals, families, personal property, pets, forced by conflict, violence, and ecological disasters to migrate. The images resonate between the gloomy and the ill-fated to the playful and more hopeful, informed throughout by contingency and collective trauma.

Attached are photographs from the new Ukrzaliznytsia series. In 2022, PhMuseum presented an exhibition featuring works from the earlier stages of this project. With this application, I hope to bring the series together, highlighting its evolution both in artistic methods and in the social and historical context, as Ukrzaliznytsia’s operations have been profoundly shaped by Russia’s ongoing full-scale invasion. It would be a great honor to collaborate with PhMuseum once again, showcasing the continuation of this work and the further development of my artistic practice.

Julie Poly (Yulia Polyashchenko) was born in Stakhanov (Luhansk region) and studied in Kharkiv, a city central to her artistic formation. Before Russia’s full-scale invasion, she lived in Kyiv; today, she is based in Berlin.

Beginning within Kharkiv’s independent art scene and influenced by the Kharkiv School of Photography, she first worked with raw documentary imagery before shifting toward staged fashion photography in 2013.

Her portfolio includes Ukrainian Vogue, L’Officiel, and Harper’s Bazaar, alongside contributions to Dazed & Confused, i-D, NUMERO, and Jalouse.

In 2021, she founded the erotic art magazine Hrishnytsia, dedicated to exploring sexuality, gender, and intimacy in Ukraine through collaborations with contemporary artists.

Julie’s work blends documentary and staged approaches, reinterpreting everyday Ukrainian visual codes with a focus on eroticism, fashion, and shifting ideals of beauty. Her exhibitions often return to their original contexts — such as railway stations (Ukrzaliznytsia) or gaming halls (Kosmolot) — incorporating installation and performance into immersive statements.