Looking for the Soul of Abkhazia
Isolated since a bloody 1992 conflict with Georgian troops, Abkhazia is like a time capsule, still dependent on Russian tourist dollars. Ksenia Kuleshova looked beyond the bullet holes to find its soul.
But Abkhazia — which, in the local language, means “land of the soul”— is more than its decay and its disputed political status, said the Russian photographer Ksenia Kuleshova. She began photographing there in 2015 as an undergraduate at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Hanover, Germany, and has returned three times since to work on an ongoing project.