FRONT Exhibition

Client: Rezidenta9

Year: 2024

For the FRONT exhibition dedicated to war photojournalists Larisa Kalik and Vadim Ghirda, our contribution was to present the timeline of their career path but we also aimed to provide context and provoke reflection. What does it truly mean to talk about wars? How many lives are uprooted, and how many people are displaced by conflict? When does a state-based armed conflict begin or end? What, in essence, is a war? And, most poignantly, how were the lives of the two featured photojournalists intertwined with the bloody threads of history?

To explore and answer these questions and many others that appeared along the way, we created three data visualizations that bring clarity and depth to the subject. 

Wars and Journeys as Lived by Larisa Kalik

Because the life of Larisa Kalik, a young journalist born in Tiraspol, was shaped by war, her timeline traces key moments in the conflicts that defined her career, starting with Russia’s aggressions in Moldova and continuing through the war in Ukraine. Through the map, you can follow Larisa’s journey, as she strives to demonstrate how journalism remains a vital tool for justice, truth, and global understanding.

The accompanying text on the left provides historical context, detailing the invasion of Donbas and the illegal annexation of Crimea. 

Vadim Ghirda. Work, Wars & the Media Landscape 

Born in 1971, Vadim Ghirda has been documenting conflict since his teenage years. Starting with the post-1989 turmoil in his recently democratized home country of Romania and continuing with the war in the breakaway Moldovan region of Transnistria, Ghirda has traveled to many hotbeds of war and occupation. His career, which spans more than three decades, has taken him to sites of NATO bombings, Russian invasions, and US-led airstrikes. How has the very nature of war and its coverage in the media shifted during this time?

To answer this question, we created a timeline tracing Vadim’s remarkable career alongside an examination of the relationship between armed conflict events and their media portrayal. We measured the intensity of conflict by analyzing the total number of monthly fatalities, drawing from data provided by the Upsala University Armed Conflict Dataset. Simultaneously, we quantified media coverage by aggregating the monthly volume of articles referencing conflict, leveraging data from the GDELT (Global Database of Events, Language, and Tone) project, a massive database that monitors global news media in over 100 languages to identify events, themes, and narratives shaping our world. 

How Many Armed Conflicts Have You Lived Through

For many of us alive today, wars are something that happened in history books and on TV news. They usually take place somewhere far and affect people we will most likely never meet. As this has been changing over the past years, we encourage you to find out how many wars have actually been waged around the world since you’ve been living in it. Pick your birth year, then follow the evolution of the bars to the present year. War is more present in your life than you might think. This chart was created based on the Uppsala University Conflict Database, a conflict-year dataset with information on armed conflict where at least one party is the government of a state in the time period 1946-2022.