Heat Signatures
Cracow, 17.05.2026 - 20.06.2026
Artists:
Vitaliy Gersymenko
Curator:
Tobias Zielony
Vitaliy Gersymenko
Curator:
Tobias Zielony
Vitaliy Gerasymenko
Heat Signatures
What happens to human vision when the rules of the visible world cease to apply? Between 2024 and 2025, while serving in an assault battalion of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Vitaliy Gerasymenko documented not only the war zone itself, but also a profound shift in perception.
Here, the frontline emerges not as a fixed geography but as a cognitive and sensory condition—one increasingly shaped by machine vision, where drones, sensors, and targeting systems redefine what can be seen and by whom.
Heat Signatures operates within this altered regime of visibility. It is an intimate record of a nervous system held in a state of permanent tension, suspended in a temporal limbo where experience oscillates between extremes: the accelerated time of combat and the prolonged, stretched-out phase of waiting.
Drawing on the spectral aesthetics of thermal imaging, Gerasymenko’s photographs engage with the logic of machine perception, in which bodies appear as traces of heat and the environment dissolves into gradients of intensity. Vision is no longer rooted in human optics; instead, it is mediated by technologies that abstract, classify, and operationalize the visible.
In the context of war, the project unfolds within a broader crisis of the documentary image. Documentary, long associated with the act of recording and evidencing reality, is challenged by the rise of automated vision—systems that do not merely register reality but actively participate in its production. Gerasymenko’s images inhabit this tension, oscillating between testimony and translation, between lived experience and its algorithmic processing. The result is not a stable document but a field of perceptual negotiation.
Moving through seemingly abandoned villages, the artist’s gaze lingers on the silhouettes of his companions. Weapons and machines appear not only as instruments of violence, but as extensions of an optical regime in which survival depends upon visibility. Within this landscape, to see is to be seen; to remain unseen is to survive.
Rather than reinforcing the authority of the image, Heat Signatures remains within its instability. The project asks what forms of testimony remain possible when perception is delegated to machines, and what forms of life continue to evade registration. The frontline becomes both a physical and an epistemological boundary—a site where human vision confronts its own limitations and where the documentary image once again fragments into new and uncertain forms.
Vitaliy Gerasymenko (b. 1993, Ukraine) is a cinematographer and photographer currently documenting the frontline as a member of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Trained in both filmmaking and linguistics, his work investigates disruptions of human perception under conditions of extreme tension. His practice has evolved from traditional photojournalism toward a conceptual mapping of the “zero line” as a space that is simultaneously cognitive and technological.
Drawing on the aesthetics of the contemporary battlefield, Gerasymenko creates images from a position of direct immersion—one in which the landscape is stripped of its familiar, surface layer. His work seeks to capture the invisible atmosphere of the frontline, producing a poignant, embodied record of the coexistence of human and machine within the realities of the ongoing Russian invasion.
Part of SHOWOFF section - PHOTOMONTH Festival Cracow 2026
Heat Signatures
What happens to human vision when the rules of the visible world cease to apply? Between 2024 and 2025, while serving in an assault battalion of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Vitaliy Gerasymenko documented not only the war zone itself, but also a profound shift in perception.
Here, the frontline emerges not as a fixed geography but as a cognitive and sensory condition—one increasingly shaped by machine vision, where drones, sensors, and targeting systems redefine what can be seen and by whom.
Heat Signatures operates within this altered regime of visibility. It is an intimate record of a nervous system held in a state of permanent tension, suspended in a temporal limbo where experience oscillates between extremes: the accelerated time of combat and the prolonged, stretched-out phase of waiting.
Drawing on the spectral aesthetics of thermal imaging, Gerasymenko’s photographs engage with the logic of machine perception, in which bodies appear as traces of heat and the environment dissolves into gradients of intensity. Vision is no longer rooted in human optics; instead, it is mediated by technologies that abstract, classify, and operationalize the visible.
In the context of war, the project unfolds within a broader crisis of the documentary image. Documentary, long associated with the act of recording and evidencing reality, is challenged by the rise of automated vision—systems that do not merely register reality but actively participate in its production. Gerasymenko’s images inhabit this tension, oscillating between testimony and translation, between lived experience and its algorithmic processing. The result is not a stable document but a field of perceptual negotiation.
Moving through seemingly abandoned villages, the artist’s gaze lingers on the silhouettes of his companions. Weapons and machines appear not only as instruments of violence, but as extensions of an optical regime in which survival depends upon visibility. Within this landscape, to see is to be seen; to remain unseen is to survive.
Rather than reinforcing the authority of the image, Heat Signatures remains within its instability. The project asks what forms of testimony remain possible when perception is delegated to machines, and what forms of life continue to evade registration. The frontline becomes both a physical and an epistemological boundary—a site where human vision confronts its own limitations and where the documentary image once again fragments into new and uncertain forms.
Vitaliy Gerasymenko (b. 1993, Ukraine) is a cinematographer and photographer currently documenting the frontline as a member of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Trained in both filmmaking and linguistics, his work investigates disruptions of human perception under conditions of extreme tension. His practice has evolved from traditional photojournalism toward a conceptual mapping of the “zero line” as a space that is simultaneously cognitive and technological.
Drawing on the aesthetics of the contemporary battlefield, Gerasymenko creates images from a position of direct immersion—one in which the landscape is stripped of its familiar, surface layer. His work seeks to capture the invisible atmosphere of the frontline, producing a poignant, embodied record of the coexistence of human and machine within the realities of the ongoing Russian invasion.
Part of SHOWOFF section - PHOTOMONTH Festival Cracow 2026
