“In search of Silence” was launched in the first months of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. 

The project is a collaboration between composer and sound artist Anton Baibakov and director, curator and collector Oleg Sosnov. It is a search for a universal language, a means of expression which aims to restart the mechanism of stopping war.

"In Search of Silence" is a powerful and thought-provoking audiovisual triptych that explores the impact of the war in Ukraine on individuals and communities. The project brings together the work of three Ukrainian photographers - Oleksandr Glyadyelov, Maksym Dondyuk, and Vladyslav Krasnoshchok - who have documented historical events since the start of the full-scale invasion.

The expansive soundtrack created by Anton Baibakov emphasizes the monotony of absolute evil and the emptiness that war leaves behind, counteracted by the deprivation of sensitivity and empathy that can come from perceiving the world solely through news feeds.

This work was commissioned by Stone Nest and spatialised at 4DSOUND Studio, Amsterdam.

Anton Baibakov is a composer and musician based in Kyiv, Ukraine. Baibakov graduated as a film sound director and spent his early career as a sound director, but is now better known as an accomplished film composer.

Oleksandr Glyadyelov has been filming for about 30years and covering military conflicts in different places: Chechnya, Moldova and Nagorno-Karabakh. Since 2014, he has documented the events of the Revolution of Dignity in Ukraine, as well as the war in the east of the country, in particular, front-line life in Donbas. In 2014, together with photographers Max Levin and Maksym Dondyuk, Oleksandr left the besieged city of Ilovaisk. Oleksander’s photographs capture the silence that can be felt after shelling and explosions, the feeling of emptiness left behind by war.

Maksym Dondyuk is a Ukrainian photographer who filmed the Revolution of Dignity and the war in eastern Ukraine, including the Ilovai Cauldron. In February and March 2022, he also filmed battles in the Kyiv region, in Irpen, and later throughout Ukraine, where there were hostilities. Dondyuk calls his approach to photography "emotional documentary." He tries to capture the emotional essence of the event, and not just document its actual course.

Vladyslav Krasnoshchok is a Ukrainian artist and representative of the Kharkiv School of Photography. He was born in 1980, and together with Serhii Lebedynskyi and Vadym Trikoz, created the legendary artistic group SHYLO in 2010. Vladyslav began to practice art in 2009; before that, he worked as a maxillofacial surgeon at the Kharkiv Emergency Hospital. Vladyslav Krasnoshchok says of his war pictures that they are an attempt to document events with the help of artistic photography. The artist himself does not change anything in the frame, but rather preserves truthfulness, and achieves creative expressiveness through his own vision of the picture and work with an analog camera, black and white light-sensitive film, and manual printing.