SUPERPOSITION
(2016) INSTALLATION (PHOTOGRAPHY, VIDEO)
Superposition researches an issue of personal relations agented by a dating platform: a space of trust and intimacy, from the one hand, and an exploiting game with a lack of empathy, from the other.
From the text to "Barbarians" / An Archive of Censorship (Mamuta Art Center, Jerusalem, 2018)
The project has faced numerous restrictions in Russia. It was never fully published, always facing censorship and limitations. It was given a state grant from the Russian Photography Union. But before the application to the Russian Ministry of Culture, I was called and asked to remove from my application all the pictures containing nudity. The answer to this restriction is not an explicit content itself but a possible violation of the so-called «Anti-gay law», an unofficial name for the notorious Russian federal law "for the Purpose of Protecting Children from Information Advocating for a Denial of Traditional Family Values" which came into being in 2013.
The project has faced numerous restrictions in Russia. It was never fully published, always facing censorship and limitations. It was given a state grant from the Russian Photography Union. But before the application to the Russian Ministry of Culture, I was called and asked to remove from my application all the pictures containing nudity. The answer to this restriction is not an explicit content itself but a possible violation of the so-called «Anti-gay law», an unofficial name for the notorious Russian federal law "for the Purpose of Protecting Children from Information Advocating for a Denial of Traditional Family Values" which came into being in 2013.
Asymmetric communication and exploitation became the leitmotif of the series. Talking about the exploitation of gaze (in its wobbly dominative/ submissive dimension in a system of social and gender correlations) and exploitation of reciprocal trust. Most models who voluntarily agreed to shoot via dating platforms were white men from 25 to 45. The core prerequisite of the project appeared to be the principle of choosing from a photo. The empathy-establishing mechanism was tightly entangled with trust. Knowing almost nothing about me, most respondents agreed to be photographed and filmed at their places.
From my side, all the ideas of shooting setups were alienated from me and handed away to models. Apart from the photographs, I was filming staged video portraits in my presence and absence. Such an invasion of a camera person into a personal space and the fact that the one obtained personal material afterwards remained outside the brackets. To lead this paradox to the extreme, I decided to materialize a symbolic act of appropriation and started to pocket some of my models' personal belongings. For me, this happens to be a performative trial to establish horizontal equal communication. From the very beginning, all actor's positions were truly unstable. No one could say for sure who was taking advantage.
