In an English kitchen, far from Lviv, everyday life turns into Kitchen Studio—the project by Ukrainian photographer Taras Bychko that transforms the domestic heart of the home into an intimate theater where time settles in silence, among dishes and lit lamps.

After leaving Ukraine following the Russian invasion, Bychko found himself facing a void: the previous project, Two Rooms, had stayed behind in the Lviv apartment, along with the memories and habits that had generated it. Kitchen Studio was born from this distance, from the need to recompose a space of presence and memory in a new place, within the walls of a British house that slowly becomes a real home.

The kitchen becomes both set and sanctuary. Here every daily gesture turns into a rite, every dinner into a small performance. The photographs are constructed yet not artificial: the family members play themselves, taking on the role of those who keep on existing, cooking, talking, keeping quiet. There’s a sacred tone in these images, a light that recalls icons, but also the fragility of everyday life.

The table is a stage, plates become props, and the shadows draw closed like curtains. Bychko directs with the delicacy of someone who knows his subjects well—his wife, his children—and observes them with the awareness that intimacy is the purest form of truth.

If Two Rooms was a diary of childhood, Kitchen Studio is a family portrait in several acts, a domestic narrative that questions the very meaning of home. Because home, after all, is not a physical place: it is a relationship, an invisible choreography that accompanies us wherever we go.

In these photographs, the kitchen is the center of the world. It is the meeting point between what remains and what changes, between memory and the present. It is the space that holds the family together, even when everything else shifts.