Oleg Dimov began working on the project Words Slightly Louder than Night in 2022, before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Since then, much has changed in our lives. War scars us forever. War takes away. We bury relatives, friends, and neighbors. We defend our values and our land. Yet we’ve lost the carefree ease of being. The horrors that war has brought into our lives constantly accompany us, no matter where we are or what we do.

The project Words Slightly Louder than Night reflects the continuous and unyielding development of life, its endurance and resilience over time, despite war. Dimov draws our attention to humanity’s and society’s ability to persist, overcoming challenges, fears, and losses while preserving values and essence. It’s vital to maintain the continuity of cultural and social existence.

The very title of the project layers deep meanings. The “word” in the biblical sense is a stream of thought, unstoppable and serving as a source for creating the new. Thought is the beginning of life. A thought resonates like the night. But we also sense a prohibition or fear—or both—of the thought becoming expressive, loud, and clear. Silence, darkness, rustling, and cold fill our lungs and give rise to restless thoughts at night. Here, the night serves as a metaphor for a challenging life period, into which the war and its inevitable gloom have plunged us.

The title comes from a line in the artist’s poetry:
Words slightly louder than night.
Between “words” and “night” lies all the tension, resonance, and potential of language, which Dimov employs in both his artistic practice and poetry. Poetry and photography in Oleg Dimov’s work exist as parallel dimensions of the personal, needing to be made public for the art to take place:

Only when I cover my face,
Words slightly louder than night.
Help me, God…

The project Words Slightly Louder than Night encompasses several series created between 2022 and 2024: Another Landscape, Night, Morning, Stains, and The Time When I Am Not Home. These works are characterized by nuanced complexity. Dimov demonstrates a unique ability to capture the mood of place and time, making his artistic practice both relevant and deeply resonant. His landscapes are introspective and reflective, inviting us to delve into the emotional depth of contemporary Ukrainian life, thereby portraying a universal human state during wartime.

The Another Landscape series, with its beachscapes, evokes mixed and anxious feelings at first glance. Dimov skillfully crafts moments of existential solitude using small architectural elements, contrasting shadows, vividly colored skies, and intentionally removing the sea. The emptiness and stillness of these seascapes—without the sea—hint at narratives beyond the visible, prompting critical reflection. The sharply defined horizons in Another Landscape deliberately create tension and unease. “Another Landscape depicts motifs from Odesa’s beaches, and as an Odesa-based artist, this is my attempt to comment on the dangers coming from the sea,” the artist notes. “In this series, the removal of the sea was intentional. In each landscape, I erased the sea as stains that don’t exist.”

In the subsequent series, Oleg Dimov continues to provoke thoughts about the perception and impact of the environment during war. Night is a cycle of photographs imbued with a sense of inevitability and anxiety. Here, Dimov combines images of urban landscapes with and without people. In scenes with figures, they seem cut out from their surroundings, disconnected despite their proximity, creating an atmosphere of alienation. These photographs encourage reflections on the individual’s place in modernity and the search for personal identity.

The urban spatial landscapes, featuring buildings with completely dark, empty windows, amplify these feelings. Through the imagery of homes, Dimov explores the painful theme of home for Ukrainians today. The steadfastness of the buildings symbolizes the resilience and courage we need to face ever-new challenges.

Night. Absence of wind.
Rain in a frozen time.
Choose what I’ll recall first in the morning.

In Night, Dimov intentionally creates expressive but restrained tension. The photographs were taken during the day, when the city was bathed in light. Yet through his unique editing, the artist creates a liminal state where the aesthetics of morning and night overlap. “Morning as a continuation of the night. This reflects the variability of our states. These are, essentially, different yet very similar periods of time,” notes the artist.

After night always comes morning. Morning is a special time of day. Unlike the night, morning symbolizes awakening, renewal, and beginnings. The world fills with soft light, gradually revealing its colors. Dimov photographs trees but leaves these images unedited, preserving their “untouched” quality. Morning represents the transition from night to day: from darkness to light, from silence to noise, from stillness to motion. The energy of this transition is what the artist conveys. Oleg reminds us of life’s cycles, emphasizing that each day is worth becoming part of our personal story of being.

Places were yielded
To distant whispers
By silent trees.

A sense of confinement, pressure, and lack of air—feelings that catch us off guard among trees bathed in soft morning light—are evoked when viewing the photographs from the Morning series. “I feel that these trees I keep photographing, their roots, these night houses, and their foundations—they represent what holds us back from simply leaving. Again, it’s this abstractness of words, their vague meanings, but they resonate with the complexities of life in Ukraine today. Can we yield space? Can a tree leave the country? What happens then to its roots?” the artist explains, urging an internal dialogue through his symbolic work.

Dimov’s lyricism peaks in his Stains series, which narrates the “story of light,” highlighting fragments pulled into focus at random. Whether it’s a lit patch of early spring greenery, bright red tulips, or grass scorched by a Russian shell—light stains with ash—the artist masterfully centers compositions around these luminous details. Here, light serves as a symbol of revelation. “I remember February, the unbearable winter, and then suddenly spring began. The first spring after the invasion. The city was empty. We often walked in the park near my home, and grass began to grow there, wildly as if it sensed its last chance to grow before destruction,” the artist recalls.

In the The Time When I Am Not Home series, Dimov touches on nostalgia for the past and what has been lost. Through his lens, we peer into an empty room. But is it truly emptiness? Everything continues—time flows organically, sunlight shifts across the windowsill, lands in stripes on the tabletop, dips into a coffee cup, and gleams on the curtains. Here, the interplay of light and shadow intensifies the silence of solitude and the intimate nature of the setting. These works reflect a longing for time past and missed opportunities, highlighting the impermanence of human experience.

Oleg Dimov dares to speak about time—its continuity—without smoothing over images or concealing symbols. He speaks of time when its value equals the value of life. In Words Slightly Louder than Night, the artist invites us into a conversation: about political time, the time of community consolidation, as well as the time of sorrow, awakening, and forgetfulness. For me, Oleg Dimov is an artist who provokes honesty with ourselves, authenticity, and the expansion of personal boundaries despite external circumstances. “The intuitive allows for instantaneous creation from within,” Oleg notes in our conversation. In these words, I hear a creative freedom that provides insight into how the artist captures and expresses the unique Ukrainian experience, making it accessible and comprehensible to a broad audience.

Marina Shcherbenko
Curator of the project