Disappearing Worlds: photos at the cusp of change

Man drops a fishing net into a watery opening in ice against an icy white landscape

The Last Days of Georgian Nomads, Natela Grigalashvili

In this video, WPF’s Bridget Conley speaks with Stephenie Young, curator of Disappearing Worlds: The photographs of Evgenia Arbugaeva and Natela Grigalashvili, a new photography show at Greg Cranna’s Bridge Gallery in Cambridge, MA, open from September 9 to October 14, 2023. The two photographers whose work is being shown, Evgenia Arbugaeva and Natela Grigalashvili, are from disparate post-Soviet sites, Tiksi in Siberia (Russia) and Adjara, Georgia. However, both capture ways of living that are on the cusp of disappearing. They portray fragile human worlds at the mercy of forces — changes in history, economics, politics, and climate — that are much bigger than the individual lives foregrounded in their work. You can preview two images below, with more on the Gallery website.

Dr. Stephenie Young is professor of Comparative Literature in the English Department and Senior Research Associate for the SSU Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies.

Images from Disappearing Worlds

Bridget Conley leads WPF’s research programs on atrocity response and incarceration, and works closely with the Executive Director on project development, fundraising and strategic vision for WPF. Currently, her primary research focus concerns the implications of American mass incarceration for local, national and international policies.

She also leads our program on mass atrocities and was a researcher on the mass starvation program. The author of Memory from the Margins: Ethiopia’s Red Terror Martyrs Memorial Museum (Palgrave 2019); co-editor of Accountability for Starvation: Testing the Limits of the Law (Oxford University Press, 2021), and editor of How Mass Atrocities End: Studies from Guatemala, Burundi, Indonesia, the Sudans, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Iraq (Cambridge University Press 2016), she has also published on starvation crimes, the 1992 – 1995 war in Bosnia, mass atrocities and genocide, and how museums can engage on human rights issues.

She previously worked as Research Director for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Committee on Conscience, where she led the Museum’s research and projects on contemporary threats of genocide, where she produced multimedia public outreach materials, formulated positions on contemporary threats of genocide, and curated exhibitions.

She received a PhD in Comparative Literature from Binghamton University in 2001. When she is not in the office, she is happiest with her family or on a mountain summit.