margo ovcharenko
Overtime, 2021
2018-2021
Overtime is a series of photographs that focuses on a football boarding school and its professional women’s team on the outskirts of Moscow. It witnesses how queer teenagers come of age within systems of discipline, belonging, and visibility. My interest in the football environment grew out of experiences I share with the players, early involvement in sport in my case rhythmic gymnastics, and the process of recognizing and negotiating one’s queerness. The book attends to strategies of survival and moments of refuge that emerge through the game itself and through collective participation, while the political context remains off camera, shaping a reality in which queer identities are denied legal recognition, public visibility is criminalized, and self regulation becomes a condition of safety.
The photographs were made over four football seasons and trace the everyday life of the community on the field, in the locker room, and during informal gatherings. They register the intensity and fragility of athletic bodies and situate the players within a working class suburb where nature presses against concrete and growing up unfolds in a suffocatingly heteronormative environment. Within the narrow zones where their presence is permitted, photography becomes a tool of visual validation and shared visibility, allowing a collective identity to form inside a fragile bubble of solidarity. Overtime speaks of a desire to belong, to love, and to be loved, constructing a reality shaped by a specific historical and professional context in which intimacy, growth, and care unfold within a limited season. The final section of the series links bodily injury and emotional experience to the recurring motif of apples, introduced as signs of ripening and abundance and culminating in the image of apples discarded on the roadside.
Read Lesley Martin’s take on Overtime on Aperture’s website, where the project was shortlisted for a portfolio prize in 2022.
Read Margo Ovcharenko’s interview conducted by Yana Nosenko on LensCulture. It was published in January 2026 as part of the online exhibitions presented by the Griffin Museum of Photography.
The photographs were made over four football seasons and trace the everyday life of the community on the field, in the locker room, and during informal gatherings. They register the intensity and fragility of athletic bodies and situate the players within a working class suburb where nature presses against concrete and growing up unfolds in a suffocatingly heteronormative environment. Within the narrow zones where their presence is permitted, photography becomes a tool of visual validation and shared visibility, allowing a collective identity to form inside a fragile bubble of solidarity. Overtime speaks of a desire to belong, to love, and to be loved, constructing a reality shaped by a specific historical and professional context in which intimacy, growth, and care unfold within a limited season. The final section of the series links bodily injury and emotional experience to the recurring motif of apples, introduced as signs of ripening and abundance and culminating in the image of apples discarded on the roadside.
Read Lesley Martin’s take on Overtime on Aperture’s website, where the project was shortlisted for a portfolio prize in 2022.
Read Margo Ovcharenko’s interview conducted by Yana Nosenko on LensCulture. It was published in January 2026 as part of the online exhibitions presented by the Griffin Museum of Photography.
with feathers
2022- ongoing
The series alternates between images with text, images without text, and several text-only fragments. Two of these are lists of remembered addresses and places where I celebrated my birthday, functioning as imaginary vernacular photographs that register absence and displacement. The work ends with a city photographed from above, a movement toward the edge of a fence that oscillates between suicidal thought and the impossible flight of a flightless bird.
Positioned outside the thin walls of the zoo, the viewer is reminded how easily one can find oneself behind bars. The birds appear trapped and exposed, pressed by isolation yet driven by a persistent desire for freedom.
In the With Feathers project, photographs coexist with printed text, where the text functions as my diary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the photographs of birds act as stand-ins for the narrator’s emotional state. The series began in Kyiv in 2022 as an attempt to find tenderness in images of decorative birds, but it evolved into its opposite: the horror of captivity, exile, and loneliness. At first, I wrote these texts as a Ukrainian artist who grew up in Russia and returned to her homeland, and I continue the project through photographs of birds from three different countries, as a person effectively living without citizenship.
Country of Women, 2017
In Country of Women series she photographs queer women in the Eastern bloc. Margo has reached local LGBTQ+ media and communities by putting open calls for female identified queers and photographed whoever came forward in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus.
Margo addresses the lack of cultural memory available for queer women in post-soviet world. Having been overshadowed by heterosexual mainstream, queerness - and especially female one - in the former USSR, always remained a current event with no history, with little to no visual legacy. Margo approaches this issue with an attempt to bring what could be this legacy upon modern-day queer portrait. Her main tool is a subversion through posing, derivative of a soviet-era female body representation, with sport-related imaging being the most direct inspiration. The idea of physical tension under intangible circumstances - as in both competition and oppression - is a backbone for the whole series as well as some of Margo’s earlier works. Her childhood background in gymnastics first led to her project called Furious Like a Child, dealing with an issue of forced exposure of the female body in sports. This time she uses a somewhat reversed approach - inherently sexualized subject of queerness is shown through supposedly asexual posing and overall aesthetics reminiscent of Soviet-era propaganda. This way the visual identity of female queerness leans toward powerfulness, yet remains in the realm of attractiveness with the latter being a most potent device for female empowerment in Margo’s work.
Margo addresses the lack of cultural memory available for queer women in post-soviet world. Having been overshadowed by heterosexual mainstream, queerness - and especially female one - in the former USSR, always remained a current event with no history, with little to no visual legacy. Margo approaches this issue with an attempt to bring what could be this legacy upon modern-day queer portrait. Her main tool is a subversion through posing, derivative of a soviet-era female body representation, with sport-related imaging being the most direct inspiration. The idea of physical tension under intangible circumstances - as in both competition and oppression - is a backbone for the whole series as well as some of Margo’s earlier works. Her childhood background in gymnastics first led to her project called Furious Like a Child, dealing with an issue of forced exposure of the female body in sports. This time she uses a somewhat reversed approach - inherently sexualized subject of queerness is shown through supposedly asexual posing and overall aesthetics reminiscent of Soviet-era propaganda. This way the visual identity of female queerness leans toward powerfulness, yet remains in the realm of attractiveness with the latter being a most potent device for female empowerment in Margo’s work.
The ebb is a self-published book printed In Chisinau, Moldova in 2022. It was produced during a Re-public of cultural workers artist in residency program where Margo collobarated with Temirtas Iskakov. This publication is made possible thanks to 3rd studio space at Muzeul Zemstvei and Oberliht association.
Temirtas Iskakov is an architect and cultural activist from Astana, Kazakhstan. He is the founder of Fading. TSE urban research platform built around the topics of architectural heritage and collective memory. Temirtas explores urban history, material culture, visual identity of Kazakhstani cities and focuses on community building through visual storytelling, social media documentary and advocacy campaigns.
Country of women is a riso-printed zine , edition of 100. It was produced in Moscow in 2018 and its production was supported by Empty Stretch zine’s grant, a publishing initiative based in the U.S. This zine was shortlisted by Aperture in its First Photobook award. See the full list on Aperture’s website.
