Manifesta 9, the European Biennial of Contemporary Art, opens June 2 in Genk, Belgium and runs through September 30th. Beginning in the early 1990s, the biennial was created to bring Europe back together through art after the end of the Cold War. This year’s curatorial theme is The Deep of the Modern, inspired by the area’s history as a major coal mining region.

In the ghostly coal-mining towns of Eastern Ukraine, time stands still. Men die late in their fifties; women don’t live much longer. Ukrainian-born, Brooklyn-based photographer Sasha Maslov turns his lens on these human tragedies with Forgotten Village (2011), an exhibition that runs through September 3 at the Sputnik Gallery. In his photographs, Maslov captures the Ukraine’s coal miners who, trapped in this grave cycle since the fall of the Soviet Union, can’t escape their dead-end lives.