Project UPLOAD/DOWNLOAD

The Louvre Museum fascinates and terrifies me in equal parts. Since 2014, I have spent thirty-seven days inside the museum, with my camera and a notebook, trying to reflect on the real experience of visitors to one of the most visited art spaces in the world. Paintings and sculptures that have survived several centuries face people who visit the museum for once in their lives and refuse to look directly at them. Contemplation has given way to accumulation, an accumulation conducted by means of all sorts of digital devices, veritable cyclops that pound through the museum hallways stockpiling everything they see in their bottomless memory, generating a new way of staying and being in the world, a transformation of the art experience that points towards a profound modification of human nature. The result of these four years of work and more than 500 kilometers walked on the Louvre galleries is a book entitled Masterpieces: an essay on the remains of a world devoured by its images.

Heroes of this project are re-enactors of historical battles and dances, streamers, role players, saberfighters, cosplayers, strikeball players. The name of the book — Simplex — serves as a metaphor in which the number of dimensions can be infinite. Just as the characters in this book construct more and more imaginary worlds. Simplex, therefore, is an invitation to muse about the perception of reality, which seems to be equally unique and true for each of us.

Who are the people that get so angry online? Why do so many of them choose to harass people, threaten people, and stretch the freedom of speech to its limits? During the past three years, documentarist Kyrre Lien has met some of the most active online commenters across the world. From the fjords in Norway, to the U.S. desert, a boat in Denmark and an apartment in Lebanon.

Author captures the everyday life of the most famous exhibit of the Louvre Museum – Mona Liza.

The Author had been shooting for the last 6 years Pskov region, where her grandparents were born. Ekaterina wanted to capture a manifestation of the folk mysticism. According to the author, this is the
an inherent part of being Russian. Facing the fabulous world of folklore you understands that it is based on national beliefs and legends, fairytails and unconscious behavior.

In this series the ideal depiction of the Russian provinces, that exist somewhere, hidden from view, is made incarnate. The photographs reveal something previously unseen or more likely irrevocably lost and yet familiar – from paintings, book illustrations and films. The author steps away from her usual documentary style and immerses the viewer in the ephemeral space of an imagined idyll. Despite the illusory nature of this world, the photographs become convincing evidence of its existence.Dimly familiar forms are developed and become instantly recognisable – yes, everything looked exactly like that. By selectively leaving outside the frame the trappings of modernity, the author places the images on a timeless plane. The few contemporary objects that stay in the frame, not connected to present day aesthetics, serve as a reminder that what we are seeing depicted is «life-as-it-is». Deprived of a sense of belonging to a particular time, the images are drawn one step away from their normal space, closer to the mythical «Mzensk».

In my artistic practice I'm using photography for endless documentation of what is happening around. This ritual has no purpose, no beginning, no end. In daily movements I am interested in the very monotony of observations filling the digital archive of the seen. This way I'm trying to draw an analogy between the eye as a device structuring the world and modern communication devices.

At the beginning of the XX century psychoanalyst Viktor Tausk described the case of occurrence of an imaginary «Influencing machine». One of the effects produced by the impact of this machine is described as compulsion to look at pictures. The projections are shown on a plane, on the walls and window panes, wherein images are not as bulky as in typical hallucinations. In such a situation the visual construction becomes a tool of curvature for mental space. It appears as an external screen on which internal changes are projected, as well as simultaneously creates a chain of distances and turns into a change provocateur. The machine emits glimmers of influence from the new media forms – an «apparatus» that is capable of «creating and taking away thoughts and feelings». First of all I was interested in the plan of expression, namely the transition of «psychotic» from psychopathology to aesthetics. The actual speaking a visual language about the visual language itself. The goal was to see your own visual experience as if it is someone else's. To dismantle it into images and their fragments, taken from different realities and situations. By neutralizing the fictional and the real, to realize some story as a weird story, as a situation-paradox. Discovering alienation as constant tension, which allows experience to take place and have various versions of such experience.

Young Russian couples, inhabitants of Saint-Petersburg and Moscow, are sleeping early in the morning in their bedrooms. They're preparing to become parents in few months, and the camera pictures not only their poses, but also details of the interior. Bedsheets, objects of daily life and decoration tell about the way last generation that was born before the fall of the Soviet Union lives today in big cities of modern Russia.

Feud is the fraternal war in which the opposition parties often can't explain its roots and its prime cause. It is some kind of certain sacral action reproducing itself. Actually it is very difficult to be aside of the situation, there is no chance not to react for information provocations, current news and you can't avoid looking at falling down of Lenin's monument, when you are in the center of events. The strategic lie generates aggression, and you inevitably become its partner. The dissonance between common sense and reality is out of any understanding. Feud is a category of intimate space. Close people who share common bed and who have common past, suddenly become real enemies. Everyone prepares his own concealed plan and builds the strategy of envision. Who started this provocation and what is the source of its nature? You are becoming dependent on it, as if it is some kind of a drug. You feel yourself as an animal in a cage, but you can't jump out. War and Hate here look like a passion, just like the filling and identification of yourself using your counterpart.

These photographs were shot in villages or small towns of central Russia during my personal work or assignments. In the photographs there are always unfamiliar people, whom I accidentally met on the street and who agreed to pose for me. Here is the typology of Russian provincial life in the faces. Who are these people living in villages and towns, where seemingly nothing happens? Teenagers, a mother of many children, table tennis champions of the region, a head teacher with a grandson or an official in her apartment – all of them are local, unlike me. In keeping with the tradition of a ceremonial village portrait, I simultaneously study the mutual influence of man and his environment. All in order to answer the question – what does it mean to be Russian?

Like many Russians, we grew up with a faraway war constantly in the background. This war seemed to be at the very edge of both our country and our minds. It was unreal and distant, yet at the same time, we were aware that it was the most painful spot on our country's map. On television, we were told that the enemy was a Muslim and a terrorist — and that this enemy was killing and torturing Russians. We were told that our army was suffering because of a brutal people who lacked humanity. In 2009 we were told that Russia had finally won this war. But by then, we had heard so many different stories about Chechnya that we felt we needed to see it with our own eyes. So we — three Russian photographers — set out on our first journey to the capital, Grozny. From 2009 to 2018, we travelled to and from Grozny, discovering 'nine cities' within a city. They represent nine different aspects of life in Chechnya: men, women, strangers, ordinary families, Ramzan Kadyrov's rise to power, oil, religion, war, and the city's past life. We tried to describe these different worlds through photography and through recording the testimonies of dozens of people: those who inhabit the city now, those who can only remember it as a burning battlefield, and those who endured torture there and had to flee to safety.

«Once upon a time a mystic pride was noticed roaming across the valleys of north — and then got lost among us. It has been secretly living here since then, but one day it will be gone forever».

As a child I lived with my grandparents on the shore of the White Sea. I spent my time hiding behind the curtain and looking out the window of my grandfather's room. He worked as a tugboat captain in Severodvinsk. I was five when my grandfather died in front of my eyes. Several years later my grandmother died. Dealing with grief I often remembered my childhood, the walks along the shore I used to take with my family and the way I always asked them where I would end up if I kept walking for a long time.
In 2016 I went on a journey along this shore. Its name is the Summer Shore and it is the coastal area located on the western side of the Dvina river Bay in the White Sea. I went there to discover what lay there following my childhood dream. After some time I realised that to me the shore had become a link between past and present, a way of dealing with grief, nostalgia and the sense of loss. But during my journey I found only decay and fear. Fear became the most powerful emotion of the time spent on the Summer Shore and the feeling which formed my perception of the world.

Confrontation with the West gave rise to a special type of territorial formation in the Soviet Union — closed cities (ZATO). They served the state's science and defense needs as sites of nuclear weapons development (Arzamas-16) or disposal (Sverdlovsk-45), and as bases for the navy and missile forces. These cities did not appear on any maps, had encrypted names, and were called «mailboxes» – much like the secret manufacturing facilities located within these cities that had no specific address, but rather a mailbox number where all post was sent. The inhabitants of these cities were instructed not to refer to their place of residence, but rather to use name of the nearest major city (for example, Krasnoyarsk instead of Krasnoyarsk-26).
Along with the collapse of the Soviet state, a different life started up in the closed cities — they ceased to be secret. Nevertheless the borders remained closed for outsiders, as the relative prosperity that these cities enjoyed (budget subsidies, low crime rates, high-end medicine and social services) made residents wary of the first, tentative attempts to address the question of retaining the barriers. There are 41 closed cities in modern-day Russia, which are home to 1.2 million people.