Gamlet’s Lines

A portrait-led walk with Gamlet Zinkivskyi through his city. The photographs place him in front of his own pieces—aphorisms and spare figures stretched across courtyards, doors, transformer boxes and long walls. Between these portraits are fragments of Kharkiv itself: stairwells, facades, shop signs, and street textures that hold a city’s pulse when headlines grow loud.

This isn’t reportage. It looks for shape and pace: film grain, flat light, the gap between a sentence on plaster and the person standing in front of it. The war is in the background and on the ground at once—stencils, scars, quiet streets.

About the protagonist: Gamlet is one of Kharkiv’s most recognizable street artists, known for minimal line work paired with concise, philosophical texts that read like notes to passersby. During the full-scale invasion he also served voluntarily with the 13th Khartiia Brigade near Kharkiv—another line drawn on the same map.

Portraits, works without him, and city scenes sit side by side. Together they map authorship and place—and show that the walls still have something to say.