© Yuri Gudkov

Everything started when photography began to be observed as photography – as everyday photography, like an open phenomena.  Behind the photography, made not by themselves, not belonging to themselves, or photography trying to hide itself, but the opposite, those demonstrating themselves to someone unknown, and in the end it isn’t important to whom; with tremendous force everything is merged into the ever-multiplying network.  Our exhibition is about this convergence and the interconnected enchantment.  The excesses, seized by accessible to the gaze space, overcome by individual possibilities of reception and acceptance, by the space of others – neighbors, strangers, anonymous people, by the world of things and desires – authors designate to themselves the game, more serious than which and complicated to present – define yourself across another game.  Time and time again balancing between ‘we’ and ‘I’.

© Anna Bashkirova

Avito became the most attractive for participants as a platform of investigation.  It is a buying and selling service of already unneeded or new but unwanted in the future things, a meeting place of collective desires, of alien experiences and individual discovery.  Even from the beginning photography had entered such a field – photostreams, in which art itself happens with viewers.  Philosopher Philipp Lakoue Labarth speaks about the power of every great piece of art to “put aside” existence, to distance itself from being, making unknown and familiar – Unheimlich à la Freud, so that art finds itself as such, or more specific, so that it unexpectedly spots itself and it’s presence.  The nature of social media’s photostreams, like that of Avito’s where supply and demand of subjects like household goods, search for work, search for love or sale of a home, forms through photography, as much materially as intimately with the point of lowering all barriers of translation of personal space in the field of visibility, so that that known in an unknown, alien but also shared, mesmerizes, scared, and captivates simultaneously; the impossibility to watch  and impossibility to tear away your gaze.  If one peers in, then everything is uncovered, like how if not everything becomes understandable, but much in the region where it is decided to cast one’s gaze.

© Natalia Fedorova

Every participant of the exhibition defined the field of their personal interest, which is based in the responding flow of photo material, but continues in the setting of other questions.  Although investigation of the photographs themselves is the most interesting task; how they are created, and which system of presentation and which goals the author is trying to show, what they translate and uncover, what erupts between the text of postings, department in which is situated illustrations uploaded by users, what happens with those who examine these images and what do professional photographers find inspiring in this collectively formed unique esthetic.  The flow of images, already confirmed by their enormity, and that which their flow will be endless and updated, all serve as a hallucination of reality.  And as a domain of art, or of a meeting that transforms all of it’s participants, this flow forms a space of shared imagination, like a dream, in which everything is ‘dreamt’ to one another and the work of the personal and the collective psyches takes places, their attraction and connected ecstasy.  The partnership to this dream brings both the viewers and the participants in the flow of images closer, gives rise to the possibility to accept one another as the spontaneous affected opening of the possibility to find another in yourself – to feel like a direct part of a whole.

© Evgeny Litvinov

Featured artists: Bashkirova, Yury Gudkov, Nina Dudoladova, Feodora Kaplan, Evgeny Litvinov, Yury Koryakovsky, Daria Pokrass, Anna Sopova, Olga Sukhareva, Natalia Fedorova, Denis Shulepov

26.06 – 31.08.2015
FotoDepartament, Saint-Petersburg

---

LINKS
FotoDepartment 
Russia