New Borders of My Body traces a metamorphosis that begins in trauma — the loss of limbs through war — and continues in water, the primordial environment of healing and transformation. The photographs show people with amputations during aquatic rehabilitation. Their bodies, partly obscured and abstracted, hover in a threshold space where pain, memory, and presence coexist. Water becomes both maternal womb and mirror, dissolving outlines and shaping new borders.

This project tells about a deeply intimate metamorphosis — the rediscovery of one’s own body, the making of a new map of the self where absence becomes a part of wholeness. In water, the body can once again feel whole: no longer defined by what is missing, but by its capacity to adapt, to move without resistance. Physical change reverberates with a psycho-emotional shift — a return to the self in altered form.

Yet this metamorphosis is also collective. Just as the body grieves its lost parts, the country bears its own amputation — territories of Ukraine remain occupied. Still, we keep moving, finding ways to live with pain, to stand, to speak. The body becomes a site of resistance, resilience, and quiet transformation.

Rather than individual portraits, the images waver between abstraction and recognisability, pointing towards a shared vulnerability. They speak not only of the wounds carved into flesh by war, but also of the fragility and permeability of every body — personal and political — and of the urgent need for new forms of integration, for attempts to become whole within the unhealed.

Here, metamorphosis is not only survival, but an act of reimagining both the self and the territory we live upon — through care, interdependence and presence.

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All photographs were made in Lviv, at the Superhumans Rehabilitation Centre.

Superhumans is a nationwide centre for war trauma, specialising in prosthetics, reconstructive surgery, rehabilitation and psychological support for adults and children affected by war since 2022.

All services at the centre are free of charge.

The project was implemented within the framework of the “KEY WORK: Artistic Grants” program by RIBBON International, in partnership with JamFactory Art Center.