Crimea: A No Man's Land
© Grygoriy Okun. Crimean Games 1990-1993
Part 2 Performance and Staged
This section of the Crimea: A No Man’s Land exhibition contains staged photography and works based on performance for the camera where Crimean scenery (and interiors) was used as a backdrop for the artists’ imaginatinary constructions. It includes a 1981 Boris Mikhailov’s series as well as Gyigoriy Okun’s and Max Afanasiev’s projects
Performance and staged images have a long history in photography, ranging back to its invention. Staged, responsive and intuitive produced images talk much about the intentions of the image-maker. From studio to environmental settings, all images are performance. The slight smile and precise framing of the studio image are controlled performances for the camera and the perceived future reader of the text as much as the self-aware participant set in a non-studio environment. Of course, the world may function as a stage, a studio of sorts, waiting for the photographer to frame the moment, to stand in relationship to the subject at hand, to give directions and approval or simply record and edit later. Revealing “moments of decision” and not “decisive moments”.
The image above by Grygoriy Okun is an example of the point. The framing of the image, the placement of the camera, the naked body, the gesture of the hand holding the cigarette and the toning of the image, all point to a mind at work. No longer does the person (in the photograph) maintain his subjectivity but has become an object, a codified prop to meet a perceived end. Performance for the camera (which includes the photographer and future viewer) or the staging of an image, emerge from the same construct: "intention". As with all images they are produced with a level of understanding of the experience to be produced, to meet an intention, revealing the non-transparency of the object.
The meaning of the image is not set but remains fluid. Meaning is a dance with both culture and history. Images made before political changes in Crimea take on layers of interpretive acts. The images included in this exhibition are not neutral or naive but exist within a history of other images and social meanings.
Each portfolio is accessed by the link in photographer's descriptions below.
Boris Mikhailov
Boris Mikhailov (b. 1938, Kharkiv, lives in Berlin) is a patriarch of Ukrainian photography, and his Crimean Snobbism (1981) is the earliest work in this exhibition.
Mikhailov's friends and the artist himself obviously have fun posing and performing for the camera. The series was shot in a spa place called Gurzuf, popular with artists and literati before 1917. Camouflaged in sepia, the images attempt to look like pre-Soviet photographs of a bohemian crowd that once frequented Crimea. That is, until you see the crumbling down piers and other signs of late Soviet degradation. The dissonance didn't pass unnoticed on a prominent art reviewer: “But something is a little off,” Karen Rosenberg writes. “The poses are too exaggerated, the expressions strangely self-conscious. It’s not entirely surprising to learn that the fun is fictional, staged by Mr. Mikhailov in protest of the fact that the kind of leisure Westerners take for granted was not part of the Soviet lifestyle” (In Ukraine, the Chilling Winds of Change, The New York Times, January 23, 2014).
Portfolio: Crimean Snobbism. 1981
Grygoriy Okun
Grygoriy Okun (b. 1957) lived in Kharkiv, Ukraine, till 2003. He is now living in Germany.
Similar to Boris Mikhailov's 1981 Crimean Snobbism, Okun's Crimean Games (mostly 1990 – 1993) is a performance for the camera. But while Mikhailov challenged the public morale of the macabre period of communist bigotry and obscurantism with images of tempting bohemian life forbidden to virginal Soviet people, Okun's nude models enjoy the freedom and permissiveness that became available only a decade later at the time of the Soviet Union's collapse. Reminiscent of Leni Riefenstahl's muscular fantasies, Okun's photos parody a deeply rooted Soviet cult of sports achievement and physical culture, smudging it with apparent eroticism and carnality.
Portfolio: Crimean Games, 1990 – 1993, 2006
Max Afanasiev
Max Afanasiev (b. 1971) is a film director, photographer and designer from Kherson, Ukraine.
The Hotel Interiors series was made in Feodosia, Crimea, in 2013, as a side project made while shooting a movie A Stranger's Phone 2. A staged project that at first glance looks like illustrations from Kōbō Abe's The Box Man is a photographic objectification of the main idea of the movie – the all-prevailing influence of information:
It is abnormal that communication is wireless. I talk into my phone here, and the signal travels through the outer space and gets into another phone. It's a nightmare. Somebody else's signals do likewise and travel through my head. My brain. Strangers' signals – through my brain. Sometimes one needs a box, no, a super-box, to hide away.
As it has happened to individual works in this project, Afanasiev's series acquired new meanings after the 2014 annexation. Are his faceless models trying to protect themselves from the omnipresent Russian propaganda about Crimea as an integral and inalienable part of Russia? Or are they hiding themselves from the painful reality of their today's undefined status and moot prospects for the future?
Portfolio: Hotel Interiors, 2013
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