Palina Turko
Palina Turko is a photographer from Belarus, living and working in Warsaw. She works with portraiture and analogue photography, developing long-term original projects exploring themes of memory, family, loss, and corporeality. She graduated from the Warsaw Academy of Photography and Blenda Photo School and participated in educational and mentoring programs in Poland and Europe, including PhotoArtDoc. Her work has been featured in galleries and exhibitions in Warsaw, Vilnius, and Minsk, and has also been published in professional publications. In her practice, she creates artificially constructed visual spaces on the border between reality and imagination, working with a sense of transition between the documentary and the fictional. the author's Instagram
Cacner
My project is a personal and emotional story about my mother’s battle with brain cancer and how the illness changes the life of our entire family. Yet my focus is not on the disease itself or on pain, but on the relationships, feelings, and inner experiences - my mother’s, my younger sister’s, and my own.
Brain cancer affects more than the body - it seeps into every corner of life. I observe how my mother loses the ability to speak freely, mixes up words and letters, and faces sadness over her unfulfilled dreams. But in my project, I try to show not only loss, but above all the delicate web of emotions that connects us - love, tenderness, exhaustion, fear, care, and gratitude. In the pauses and the unspoken moments, a space opens for reflection on memory, time, and absence.
My attention is focused not on pain, but on the emotions and connections that arise between us. I explore how the illness steals a part of my younger sister’s childhood, forcing her to grow up too quickly. In her, innocence and confusion intertwine with a premature awareness. Through her perspective, I try to speak about the quiet loss of childhood lightness, the silent process of growing up, and the attempt to understand what cannot yet be explained.
In my photographs, I combine documentary observation with imagination and elements of fairytale imagery. For me, this project is a way of seeing and feeling - I capture inner states rather than events. A key element of my work are handmade objects and decorations created from paper, fabric, and other materials - they recall childhood play and emphasize the contrast between vulnerability and strength, reality and fantasy.
These photographs are not a chronicle of illness but a meditation on closeness, love, and growing up. What matters to me is not depicting destruction, but showing life’s fragile persistence. Each image becomes a fragment of an inner dialogue with myself and my loved ones.
It is a story of three women - a mother, a daughter, and a sister, a story without heroism, only sincerity, tenderness, and the effort to preserve light when the world changes irreversibly.
