Congratulations on your show at the Yeltsin Center! What work will you be showing there? What is the focus of this exhibition?

Petr Antonov (P.A.): The show features works by seven contemporary Russian photographers sharing a common interest in the landscape and a neutral approach as a means to reflect on it. The first thing we focus on in this exhibition is the new aesthetics of contemporary Russia, its vernacular, whatever is habitually ignored yet provides tons of information about the society we live in. The second thing is the photography that deals with it.

The word ‘landscape’ or Russian ‘пейзаж’("paysage"-directly borrowed from French) can refer both to an area and its depiction, so we like how the title of the show encompasses both points of our interest. The earliest project in the show by Liza Faktor started in 2001, the latest by Anastasia Tsayder — in 2016.

© Alexander Gronsky from the series 'Less Than One', 2006-2008

© Alexander Gronsky from the series 'Less Than One', 2006-2008

Anastasia Tsayder (AT): To quote our exhibition text, «The works of Liza Faktor, the earliest among the featured projects see Siberia as the Russian frontier, once partially tamed but deserted anew. Alexander Gronsky’s Less than One explores the outermost regions of Russia where the average population often amounts to less than one person per square kilometer. Documents of Nature by Valeri Nistratov, mainly shot along the fringes of Moscow, the country’s megacity capital looks for the marks of the nascent capitalism at the border between the urbanized and the rural. The works by Max Sher and Petr Antonov explore similar changes, except they use built environment to record the emerging aesthetics. Sergei Novikov’s Grassroots turns contemporary Russian landscapes into a gigantic backdrop for the Russian amateur football as the country prepares for the FIFA World Cup. Arcadia by Anastasia Tsayder, similarly to Valeri Nistratov’s Documents of Nature, looks at the relationship between nature and man, but instead of finding an opposition discovers a strange co-existence as nature re-conquers urban space.»

Have you worked on joint projects before? 

P.A.: Somehow we have for a while addressed very similar questions albeit using different subjects in our personal work. We had thought of joint artistic projects but never got round to make one. As we have for a long time shared ideas and worked out new ideas together, collaborating on this exhibition felt like we had done it many times before, even though it was our first joint project. Maybe a curatorial project is, in fact, a more relaxed form of collaboration than artistic work.

How did you come up with the idea of this show?

A.T.: We had had the idea of an exhibition of photography' exploring the mundanities of everyday life in contemporary Russia for years, and in the beginning, it was not focused solely on a landscape. We saw that the other photographers and we were having same interests and exploring related subjects in similar ways, so it felt quite natural that these works should be somehow put together. The landscape part came into play a couple of years ago and made this idea complete.

P.A.: Some exciting projects were focusing on the landscape, and we explored the subject as authors. The landscape is a plentiful source of information about the society in general. It shows the results of similar laws working throughout a culture, except here they are very accessible for the author and are easy to relate to by the viewer. The very language of landscape imagery is something quite familiar to the viewer.


© Liza Factor from the series 'Surface of Siberia', Dudinka, 2001

Why is there a need to curate an exhibition about the post-Soviet landscape in Russia today? Why is there an opportunity? 

A.T.: We both felt that this kind of photography was somewhat underrepresented in Russia and that there was a keen interest in the subject. We had not seen photography shows in Russia focusing on its contemporary landscape, so we thought we had to make one. The projects featured in the exhibition had never been presented together, some had not been exhibited before at all. Brought together and put into a joint context the works get additional meanings, so we hope that this is the case when the result is more than the sum of its elements.

P.A.: It was not just the photography that was underrepresented, it was the landscape itself too. As Russia was moving from centrally planned to market economy, as well as from the industrial to the post-industrial, the transformations of the landscape were enormous. The idea of such show had existed for some time, but the opportunity to make it emerged only recently. This may mean that the subject and the ways of working with this subject start to attract public interest. We see interesting parallels here with how vernacular American landscape studies by its early explorers such as JB Jackson or Robert Venturi coincided in the 1960s and 1970s with the emergence of works exploring such landscape artistically, e.g., Ed Ruscha, New Topographics, to name a few.

A.T.: We also wanted to expand the meaning of the exhibition beyond photography itself, so there is an extensive public programme running alongside to the show. Throughout the three months of its duration in Yekaterinburg, it will be accompanied by lectures, discussions, public talks on the subjects of landscape and urban studies, contemporary photography, and their possible relations. So we hope that the exhibition will help produce new content apart from showing the existing one.


© Valeri Nistratov from the series 'Documents of Nature', 2008


© Valeri Nistratov from the series 'Documents of Nature', 2008

Where are you from? Could you describe the place where you grow up?

P.A.: I was born and spent my childhood in Moscow where I currently live. The neighborhood where I was growing up had all traces of both urban and rural somehow mixed together, which I think is quite typical for so many other inhabited locations of the former Soviet Union. The project that I am showing in this exhibition was also shot entirely in Moscow and its nearest suburbs. For me, Moscow is the most concentrated form of Russia, so it allowed me to speak about any post-Soviet inhabited landscape and at the same time it had the visual language that I knew best.

A.T.: My childhood experiences do influence my work a lot. As a child, I spent a lot of time traveling between Karelia in the north of Russia where my parents live, St Petersburg where my grandparents live, and a very traditional Russian village in Kursk region in the south of Russia. In a way, I am still under the spell of this southern village, even though I did make one of my projects there (Mzensk) re-living my childhood experiences as an adult. Apart from being visually very special in how it preserved its traditional rural houses virtually unchanged, it also amazes me with how its people relate to one another, the very tight society bonds that exist there.


© Max Sher from the series 'Palimpsests', Smolensk, 2013

© Max Sher from the series 'Palimpsests', Smolensk, 2013

How would you describe your curatorial practice, what is the primary focus of your research?

P.A.: Being photographers ourselves we were working on this exhibition to an extent in a similar way to how we work on our personal projects. We started with a specific core and were then building it up around it. We tried to make sure that each work added up to the works of other authors, and that there were no repetitions, with the result being a conversation flow rather than a tautology. What we wanted to have in the end were authors’ statements, rather than our statements made through their work. We tried to be cautious and limit our involvement to the selection of the projects and images in a way that they would seamlessly blend into a larger project.

A.T.: Our research followed the two meanings of the word landscape mentioned earlier and took the two respective directions. That is the new landscape that was emerging, and the new photography that was dealing with it. Putting the works together we structured the exhibition along with a timeline and tried to explore how the landscape changed over time, and how the artists’ response to this landscape and their choice of subjects changed accordingly.

P.A.: To an extent, this exhibition had existed and curated itself before its materialization. It is a small community despite the country’s size and all photographers participating in the show were familiar with each other’s work. So each project was exploring that which was not present in others’ works. In a way what was left to us was to place the right pegs in the right holes.


© Petr Antonov from the series 'Trees, cars, figures of people, assorted barriers', Moscow, 2011

Are you planning on exhibiting the show abroad?

A.T.: The exhibition is now shown in Yekaterinburg and will run through the end of May. It is then planned to be displayed in Krasnoyarsk, a city roughly 2000 kilometers apart. These are the confirmed venues, but we are thinking of other locations which would — as Yekaterinburg and Krasnoyarsk — too act as significant cultural and economic hubs for their regions. After that, we want to bring it to Saint Petersburg and Moscow.

P.A.: For now we have focused on working out the agenda for Russia, but we want to show it abroad too. Maybe we should start with former Soviet republics or Eastern Block countries, with whom we share the centrally planned landscape and whose recent treatment of such landscape can be similar or dissimilar to ours. We will see what opportunities may arise and are open to all kinds of offers.


© Anastasia Tsayder from the series 'Arcadia', Togliatti, 2016


© Anastasia Tsayder from the series 'Arcadia', Togliatti, 2016 

In your opinion, are there any distinct tendencies in contemporary Russian photography?

P.A.: I feel that contemporary Russian photography is international both in its subject matter and in the way it conveys it. As to what is unique to Russian photography is an interesting question. I have been thinking about it myself, yet I am not sure if I know what it is, except that Russian photography depicts Russia. Can we really speak about country-specific tendencies in the age of instantaneous transfer of information? There may be things that I overlook, being an artist rather than a proper curator I may be focusing too much on what interests me and may fail to spot the current tendencies.


© Sergrey Novikov from the series 'Grassroots', Artem, Vladivostok region, 2016

The "post-Soviet" of your exhibition is synonymous with lost glories, or rather with national tragedy?

P.A.: To us, "post-Soviet" is a way to describe what happened after the “Soviet,” so it is rather a temporal than an emotional definition. The post-Soviet condition and the post-Soviet landscape are markedly different from the Soviet, despite one may expect them to be similar. Speaking about the landscape, the Soviet landscape was entirely and centrally planned in its intent (albeit often only in its intent), whereas the post-Soviet landscape (and especially in its early forms) took whatever there was unplanned in the Soviet landscape and blew it out of proportion. We see it as a sum of uncoordinated, uncentralized actions by private agents, a sort of an antithesis to the Soviet landscape. Of course, there’s scarcely a 100% post-Soviet landscape as such. Virtually any landscape bears traces of the Soviet and often follows the same rules that were shaping Soviet landscapes.

A.T.: The two are a dense mixture, a visual palimpsest as is pointed out in the title of Max Sher’s project.

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LINKS

Alexander Gronsky
Anastasia Tsayder
Liza Factor
Max Sher
Petr Antonov
Sergey Novikov
Valeri Nistratov

Yeltsin Center Museum Yekaterinburg
Urbanautica Russia