Elenka Donbrova

This project began in 2016 following a visit to the Soviet War Memorial in Berlin’s Treptower Park, dedicated to Red Army soldiers who died during the final battles of the Second World War. What started as a personal encounter gradually developed into a broader investigation of how war is remembered through monuments and public space.

During this research, an unexpected discovery emerged: some of the earliest memorials dedicated to what is known in the former Soviet Union as the Great Patriotic War (1941–1945) were created before the conflict itself had ended. Acts of commemoration began while the outcome of the war was still uncertain, revealing memory not as a retrospective gesture, but as a process unfolding in real time.

One of the first examples appeared in the Moscow Metro. Partizanskaya Station, opened in 1944, was conceived as a monument to partisan resistance and the connection between the military front and civilian life. Around the same period, Moscow’s Victory Bridge was built as a symbolic expression of confidence in eventual victory, despite the ongoing conflict.

The project’s title refers to the celebrated Soviet song On an Unnamed Height, inspired by an actual wartime episode. Over time, the phrase has come to signify not a single location but countless sites marked by memory. Any hill, field, crossroads, village, or forest clearing associated with loss and sacrifice can become an “unnamed height” – a place where history remains present within the landscape.

In Belarus, large-scale memorialization began shortly after the war. Thousands of monuments, memorials, obelisks, and military burial sites were erected across the country, creating one of Europe’s most extensive commemorative landscapes. While many adopted recurring sculptural forms and visual motifs, together they established a shared language of remembrance that continues to shape public memory today.

Belarus can be seen as an open-air museum of memory. More than 9,000 monuments and military burial sites related to the Second World War are officially registered across the country, while local historical initiatives suggest that the total number of memorial markers may exceed 40,000.

The photographs presented in this exhibition do not document monuments as isolated objects. Instead, they explore their presence within the landscape and their relationship to time, environment, and collective memory. Seen through the camera, these sites become more than historical markers; they reveal the ways in which memory inhabits space and continues to shape cultural identity across generations.

Elenka Donbrova’s artistic practice focuses on cultural memory, historical landscapes, and the relationship between place and collective experience. Working at the intersection of documentary photography and artistic research, she approaches photography as a tool for investigating how history becomes embedded within the built and natural environment.

Her projects explore the connections between memory, landscape, and visual culture, examining the ways in which traces of the past continue to inhabit contemporary space.

Donbrova is a member of the Belarusian Public Association of Photographers, the Belarusian Union of Designers, and the Board of the Belarusian National Photoclub Minsk. She has curated sixteen exhibition projects and participated in more than fifty group exhibitions and six solo exhibitions.