The Missing Picture Alternative Contemporary Photography in the Soviet Union
The Lehman College Art Gallery presents an exhibition of works by five contemporary Soviet artists (four from Russia and one from Ukraine) was organized by guest curator John Jacob in collaboration with SOYUZHUDOZ Export in Moscow for the MIT List Visual Arts Center, in Cambridge Massachusetts. Since it went on view at MIT in December of 1990, the Soviet Union has been shake up by an attempted coup, declarations of independence by various republics, and other dramatic political events. The exhibition is constructed into two parts, reflects the climate leading up to those changes. The artists use a photographic medium in new ways to revise the cultural identifications that had been determined by a decades-long series of uniform images, objects, and events.
Included in the exhibition are Alexey Shulgin, Maria Serebrjakova, Ilya Piganov, and Vladimir Kupreanov: four young artists from the first generation to grow up knowing cultural repression and emerge in a time of greater liberation. They have had the opportunity to witness the rehabilitation of earlier generations of Soviet artists of the 1920s to the underground and emigre artists of the 1960s-1980s. These artists address the ideological functions of t he photographic medium within contemporary Soviet culture. They refute the established western notion of Soviet photography as predominantly photojournalistic or dominated exclusively by a Social realist esthetic. Working with found manipulated images they do not generally practice “straight” photography; and their works are much closer to the conceptual approaches of the Moscow School than the realist traditions of Soviet photography. However, their works have also been informed by teaching of several master photographers who have been working in obscurity of the last twenty years. A major influence on these younger artists is Boris Michailov, whose largely unknown works are presented here in a nearly complete retrospective in a separate section of the exhibition.
