Crimea: A No Man's Land
© Guennadi Maslov
Part 1 Documentary Observations
This section of Crimea: A No Man's Land features five artists pursuing mainly a documentary perspective in their work on Crimea. Included in this aspect of the exhibition are the portfolios: Feodosia 1986 by Eugeny Pavlov, untitled portfolios by Guennadi Maslov and Eugeny Kom, Beach Sequence by Kirill Kovalenko and Kimmerian Chronicles by Andrey Lobov.. Each portfolio is accessed by the link in descriptions below.
The documentary work included here is not drawn from the traditional documentary paradigm, as in photojournalism, but refers to the straight recordings of the photographers' subjective understandings of the space in front of them. It doesn't allow any manipulation with the image (as in the use of manual techniques, Photoshop, etc.), and, as all photography , the image is an expression or articulation of an individual position, a personal statement.
Therefore, the portfolios on display in this installment of the exhibition need to be understood as emblematic and political. All image making is in a way a political act, a moment of decision revealing in total the subjective nature of the image maker.
Eugeny Pavlov
Eugeny Pavlov (b. 1949) is a Kharkiv-based photographer, one of the founding fathers (with Boris Mikhailov) of the art community known as the Kharkiv School of photography.
Pavlov's Feodosia 1986 was made in the year of Chernobyl catastrophe. It provides an opportunity to see what Crimea was like in the Soviet times.
The series was made during the family summer holiday trip to the sea. Pavlov, being a swimming athlete in his school years didn't appreciate sea-bathing, and the Pavlovs family had to alternate between visits to the sea where the artist waited patiently for his wife and little son enjoying the sun and the sea and walks around the town of Feodosia where the family had to put up with the artist's hunt for images.
Guennadi Maslov
Guennadi Maslov (b. 1959, Kharkiv) moved to the USA in 1993, but Ukraine is still on the list of his favorite shooting destinations. His Crimean photos exhibited here were taken in 1992 – 2013.
Educated as a linguist, Maslov describes his work as “an attempt to translate the poetry of memories and dreams into the verse of photography – an attempt to catch the fluid material of the subconscious, and put it on a somewhat more stable base of photographic paper.” Despite this poetic declaration, the artist’s images are sometimes spiced with absurdity and grotesqueness so characteristic of the life in post-communist societies.
[The images] are not supposed to tell a story but rather stimulate/stir analogous universal concepts in the viewer. However, I never believed that the the concept was so overly important that the aesthetics should just shut up and hope for the best.
Maslov’s work was recently published as a photobook (Guennadi Maslov. Ukrainian Time, 2013, Hanna House Books).
Portfolio: Untitled, 1992 – 2013
Eugeny Kom
Eugeny Kom (b. 1956) has lived in Zaporizhia since 1977, but he is still registered in Yevpatoria (Eupatoria), Crimea, where his mother lives. His Crimean registration allows him to visit the peninsula regularly, and the artist's portfolio contains images of both pre- and post-annexation time.
The presented selection comes from Eugeny Kom's series “The Rest Zone”, “Adagio”, “Naked And Comical”, “The Beach Mat”, “Theater of The Absurd” taken all over the Crimean seashore from west to east and covering the period of 2004 – 2016. Kom's merciless reportage approach transforms what could otherwise look like mundane beach photography into a powerful tool anatomizing both the resort's poor infrastructure / inadequate facilities and the vacationists' habitual behavior, revealing the deeply ingrained Soviet spirit and dismal atmosphere of the place.
Portfolio: Untitled, 2004-2015
Kirill Kovalenko
Kirill Kovalenko (b. 1986) lived in Crimea for the most part of his life. He moved to Lviv after the peninsula was occupied by Russia in 2014. His staggering farewell Beach Sequence was shot in Crimea in 2014 – winter of 2015.
Kovalenko's refined minimalist color compositions create an idealistic, almost surreal picture of a world devoid of social or political issues, and the realization of the fact that they were made in the place seething with politics at the time adds to the unreality of this work. The artist explains it as a conscious attempt to recompense for the surrounding turmoil and confusion preserving the imperishable otherworldly image of the homeland to immerse in in view of the forthcoming parting.
Portfolio: Beach Sequence, 2014-15
Andrey Lobov
Andrey Lobov (b. 1977) is a Kyiv-based artist. He combines woking on art-projects with advertisement and fashion photography. In May 2011 he traveled around Crimea for two weeks to make his Kimmerian Chronicles - a series of unmanned, unpopulated landscapes.
Kimmeria is comatose. It will not react to voices, loud noises - to anything at all. It will not come to, will not open its eyes or produce a sound. No motility, no reaction to pain stimuli. It is still alive, but there is no way of waking it from its stupor.
Portfolio: Kimmerian Chronicles, 2011
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