Sketchbook Volume 3

Building on the trajectory of SKETCHBOOK Volumes 1 and 2, artist and photographer Aria Shahrokhshahi returns with SKETCHBOOK Volume 3, a new body of work created in collaboration with children living along the front line in eastern Ukraine.

Developed with the NGO BASE UA, the project continues Shahrokhshahi’s exploration of how images carry, fracture, and remake memory under conditions of crisis.

Since 2020, many of the children involved have been excluded from school — first by the pandemic, then by the full-scale Russian invasion leaving them without safe spaces to learn or play. Shahrokhshahi began the project with a set of old Ukrainian postcards: mass-printed relics that once projected an image of progress, belonging, and permanence. Nearly two generations later, they remain fragments of a previous sociopolitical schema.

He invited the children to draw directly onto the postcards. Instead of depicting the destruction around them, they overlaid the official imagery with grandmothers, favourite foods, suns, and palm trees.
Scenes of joy, memory, and imagined futures. The results are visual palimpsests, where the debris of ideology collides with the persistence of childhood imagination.

Presented alongside Shahrokhshahi’s own photography of the region, SKETCHBOOK Volume 3 forms a dialogue between documentation and invention, between inherited history and fragile possibility.

All proceeds from the accompanying magazine support BASE UA’s ongoing work with children living on the front lines.