Julie Poly (1986, Stakhaniv) lives and works in Berlin, where she relocated since the full-scale war in Ukraine. Inspired by the trivial and everyday, Julie merges her previous experience in documentarian and staged photography to interpret visual codes of the typical Ukrainian quotidian. Her work portrays eroticism, fashion, and novel notions of beauty. Poly’s exhibitions often serve as an extension of her photography, with projects returning to their origins, for example exhibiting images from the Ukrzaliznytsia series at the railway station and her Kosmolot playing cards at arcade centres. There, the works come into direct contact with the initial instigators — the common residents of Ukraine. Poly is also the publisher of Ukraine’s first erotic art-zine Hrishnytsya.