The Exhibition of Contemporary Russian Photography, Seoul

http://www.photovisa.ru/news/69?locale=en

Contemporary Russian Photography: From Mystery to Poetry and Back
Photography and Media Art based on Photography

within the 5th Seoul PHOTO 2013, Seoul, Korea
April 4 – 7, 2013

Artists:
photography
Andrey Chezhin
Kir Esadov
Vadim Gushin
Kmeli-Suneli Art Group (Viktor Khmel & Elena Sukhoveeva, Sergey Lutsenko)
Nikolay Kulebyakin
Igor Kultyshkin
Gregory Maiofis
Alisa Nikulina
Petr Rakhmanov
media art based on photography
Nikita Pirogov
Olga Tobreluts

and
Special Project
Maria Kozhanova: Russians play Cosplay (photo)

Curator:
Irina Chmyreva

Preparing the first presentation of Contemporary Russian Photography in Seoul, we focused on poetical traditions and mythology, on tradition how to visualize invisible, nevertheless the point of visualization is a part of religious or philosophic or poetical worlds, which are not separated but very often are the same, just differently named in different epochs.

The collection of Contemporary Russian Photography: from Mystery to Poetry presents the last three generations of photographers who works on the fileds of fine art photography and contemporary art. The tradition of fine art photography is deep and wide in Russia, we can say that such world-known names like Alexander Rodchenko (who’s experiments in 1920s changed the meaning of modern art and document photography) destroyed the border between art and reality, between new forms of art and fine art traditions. Contemporary Russian photographers, who works on the field of fine art photography (which is art of pure photographic language, photographic methods explanation and the art of print in the photography) combines the experience of two hundred years of photographic technology and thousands years of history of arts.  There are some examples of early video-art and last years of its development, that direction which is mostly close to photography (like in art of Nikita Pirogov) and photomontage (Olga Tobreluts, she is pioneer of Russian video-art in early 1990s), because for both of these artists photography and video are the two tools of their self-expression. Among others, in this collection there are famous names since early 1990s – Andrey Chezhin, Nikolay Kulebyakin and Vadim Gushchin, new stars like Gregory Maiofis and Igor Kultyshkin (their careers started up in late 1990s-early 2000s). Mostly these names presented Moscow and St.Petersburg, two main cultural capitals of Russia. But ten years ago the first Russian provincial artists exhibitions were highly covered by international press, it was a sign of expending of cultural space, what was artificially bordered by Soviet and post-Soviet press in two main cultural cities. The represenatives of that cultural expanding is the Khmeli-Suneli group. Their art is balancing on the line between photography as an art and conceptual contemporary art of messages.
This first group show of Russian photography in Korea consists the youngest names, which became to be familiar in last three/four years: they are Alisa Nikulina, Kir Esadov, Maria Kozhanova, Petr Rakhmanov, already named Nikita Pirogov – for whom we are looking as a future for nowadays.

Organizers of the exhibition:
ROSIZO Center for Museums and Exhibitions of the Ministry of Culture of Russia,
IRIS Foundation,
Garage Center for Contemporary Culture,
Project In Support for Photography in Russia.

COEX complex, halls A,B, Seoul, Korea