Gender Prism

An audiovisual project about the link between identity and family

The formation of identity through the prism of the family script.

Before you is an art project about Ukrainian queerness and the influence of family. We explore how the family environment shapes a person’s identities, how it affects mental and physical health, the ability to take care of yourself and to build healthy relationships with yourself and with the world in adult life.

The goal of the project is to look deep into the diversity of meanings in the family scripts of the Ukrainian LGBTQI+ community.

This audiovisual project is an artistic view of the process by which the family system is integrated into personal experience. We invite you to get to know the stories of eight queer people who shared their reflections on these topics. The visual images symbolize the many-sidedness of the human personality; the audio pieces are a musical association with the protagonists of the project.

Those who care for us from earliest childhood give us our basic knowledge about the world and about ourselves. From the very beginning, parents are an entire world for a child. This first experience of relationships largely becomes the foundation from which, as we grow up, we build our own personality.

Here you will encounter a range of experiences: unconditional acceptance and rejection, a sense of support and a sense of abandonment, being encouraged and being shamed, the risk of trusting someone with your vulnerability, intimacy in the sense of tenderness and fragile closeness and in the sense of exploring the body and sexuality.

If these stories move you, find an echo in your heart, reveal the link between childhood memories and self-awareness in adult life, and inspire you to reflect on your own experience, then the goal of this project will have been achieved. We hope that such an encounter with sincere, living people from the LGBTQI+ community will make a more empathetic attitude possible and will broaden the notion of “traditional family values”.

These stories are an inseparable part of Ukrainian social and cultural processes, because queer people have always been part of Ukrainian society. It is important to make this part of experience visible, so that queerness in the Ukrainian context gains significance and has a voice of its own.