Yulia Leidik and Evgene Kanaplev work in photography and video. Their work lies at the intersection of art, commercial and social projects. In their works they touch upon themes related to revolution, comment on political and social agenda, propaganda, work with the theme of violence and social exclusion.
Yulia Leidik, Estonian by birth, was born in 1985 in Anapa on the Black Sea. When Julia was 9 years old, local newspapers wrote about the gifted child from a large family, and published her first staged still life photography inspired by the works of Jan Saudek. As soon as Yulia turned 18, she left for Minsk, Belarus, and enrolled in the Academy of Arts to study TV advertising. Yulia's artistic endeavours at the Academy usually ended in scandal, and the project Diffusion was shown behind closed doors only for the teaching staff. After graduating, Yulia worked as a waitress and continued practising photography on her own until she met Evgene.
Evgene Kanaplev was born in Minsk in 1980. In the early 2000, living on the outskirts of the city and in search of the aesthetic in the surrounding world of endless trains, people, bridges and crossings, he developed an internal artistic movement IMism - Industrial Mystical Individualism, where the main question for him became how an individual survives in a technogenic world. At that time he was working in a funeral home making photo medallions for tombstones. Meanwhile he had a camera, and started to attend the photo club "Minsk", where his first personal exhibition "The Beginning" took place in 2005. Since 2003 for ten years Eugene has practised wedding photography, and in 2010 he was awarded the title of the best wedding photographer in Minsk. At the end of 2005 he got his own apartment, where he set up a full-scale photo studio. By 2010 together with the ZNYATA project he opened a studio with the first cyclorama in Minsk.
In 2011, Yulia and Evgene met, this gave birth to a married couple and the creative union KANAPLEV+LEIDIK. Their collaboration began in the field of wedding photography, where Evgene invited Yulia as an assistant. This kind of activity very quickly came to naught, because of Yulia's honesty and straightforwardness, when the artist's sensitive nature, incapable of deceit, expressed doubts about upcoming marriages. Thus, Yulia and Evgene moved on to advertising shooting. Recognition and demand quickly replaced the initial scepticism on the part of the artistic community of Minsk towards two photographers behind one camera. After a year the works of the creative duo appeared in the most fashionable and readable magazines, and on billboards of the city. In 2013, Yulia’s and Evgene’s photography were among 16 young artists from Belarus included in the book BY NOW: Contemporary photography from Belarus, published by the Berlin publishing house Kehrer, supported by the Goethe Institute, and became part of an exhibition that was shown in various cities around the world. In 2017, KANAPLEV+LEIDIK took first place in the Mobile Minsk photo contest, and were awarded to study at St. Martins School in London. Along with advertising projects for large Belarusian telecommunication companies, banks, and the fashion industry, the artist duo took part in photo projects at the intersection of social activism and art. Together with the camera, a deep analysis of the personality of the people portrayed has always been an important tool.

In 2020, KANAPLEV+LEIDIK transformed the image of Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya. On the crest of the Belarusian revolution, the artists created portraits of political leaders of the opposition movement and a series of portraits of symbolically significant figures that became part of the project "Belarus 2020". The Belarusian revolution of 2020 changed the lives of Yulia and Evgene, and in early 2022 to avoid political persecution the family with their two children emigrated to Warsaw. The new environment appreciated the photographers' work, and in 2022 Yulia became a fellow of the Gaude Polonia program, and in 2023 - a resident of Ambasada Kultury.