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On Tuesdays in February, visits to the Centre of Visual Culture Béton will be free of charge!
The Centre of Visual Culture Béton presents the exhibition ‘Behind the Wall of Ideology’, which will introduce viewers to a surprising and still little-studied phenomenon – non-conformism in photography. The exhibition will include 76 works by Soviet and Russian authors who explored the boundaries of visual art in their work, seeking to free photography from traditional norms and restrictions. Among them are Valentin Samarin, Boris Smelov, B.U. Kashkin, Evgeny Likhosherst, Vyacheslav Tarnovetsky, Boris Kudryakov, Alexander Kitaev and many others.
Photography of the 20th century is associated, first of all, with reportage. It served as a mirror of reality – an instrument capable of capturing historical events in the most accurate and reliable way. Like art in general, photography was heavily censored. Nevertheless, a number of photographers allowed themselves to move away from the ideology of the political and to focus on the ideology of representation – solving aesthetic problems, searching for expressive resources of the medium, engaging in art for art’s sake. These challenges forced photographers to change their tools: using distorting mirrors, cameras that manipulated perspective, microscopes, X-ray machines, and camera-less photography. In these works, the emphasis is shifted towards demonstrating fanciful lines and combinations of colours, while didactic narrative is left aside. These works are similar in their focus to Rorschach tests, as in both cases the viewer is invited to bring their own unique meanings to the image, rather than following a predetermined framework of logical narrative interpretation of the works. Works such as Abstract Expressionist paintings are orientated towards the viewer’s own emotional experience, rather than imposing strict rules of communication along a set functional course.
‘Behind the wall’ of ideology, a strong movement of photographic art has developed. The impossibility to swing over this wall, or to dig it up from below, gave photographers a certain unifying quality: a kind of introspection, an appeal to the inner resources of the photographic medium. There were their own associations, groups of independent photographers, amateur clubs, but there was virtually no public ‘struggle’ against official art, no collective action of a manifestation nature. Accordingly, photographers did not receive such public attention as the ‘second avant-garde’ (non-conformist, independent, experimental, simply ‘other’ art). Their activity did not go beyond, as sociologists say, the ‘community of their own’. Nevertheless, they managed to bring photography out of the shadow cast by the ‘wall of ideology’. And, unlike the ‘pictorial’ second avant-garde, both status professionals, members of the club movement, and individual representatives of the underground participated in this process together.
The image of the ‘darkroom’, the dark room traditionally associated in the mass consciousness with photography, is appropriate here. Indeed, it was necessary to look deeper into this ‘room’ in order not only to identify the often unknown avant-garde photographers, but also to assess the qualities of new thinking in the works of quite systematic masters. In other words, a great deal of research and collecting work was needed to examine the history of Soviet and Russian photography from this angle of introspection. And that work has been done.
On Tuesdays in February, visits to the Centre of Visual Culture Béton will be free of charge!
The Centre of Visual Culture Béton presents the exhibition ‘Behind the Wall of Ideology’, which will introduce viewers to a surprising and still little-studied phenomenon – non-conformism in photography. The exhibition will include 76 works by Soviet and Russian authors who explored the boundaries of visual art in their work, seeking to free photography from traditional norms and restrictions. Among them are Valentin Samarin, Boris Smelov, B.U. Kashkin, Evgeny Likhosherst, Vyacheslav Tarnovetsky, Boris Kudryakov, Alexander Kitaev and many others.
Photography of the 20th century is associated, first of all, with reportage. It served as a mirror of reality – an instrument capable of capturing historical events in the most accurate and reliable way. Like art in general, photography was heavily censored. Nevertheless, a number of photographers allowed themselves to move away from the ideology of the political and to focus on the ideology of representation – solving aesthetic problems, searching for expressive resources of the medium, engaging in art for art’s sake. These challenges forced photographers to change their tools: using distorting mirrors, cameras that manipulated perspective, microscopes, X-ray machines, and camera-less photography. In these works, the emphasis is shifted towards demonstrating fanciful lines and combinations of colours, while didactic narrative is left aside. These works are similar in their focus to Rorschach tests, as in both cases the viewer is invited to bring their own unique meanings to the image, rather than following a predetermined framework of logical narrative interpretation of the works. Works such as Abstract Expressionist paintings are orientated towards the viewer’s own emotional experience, rather than imposing strict rules of communication along a set functional course.
‘Behind the wall’ of ideology, a strong movement of photographic art has developed. The impossibility to swing over this wall, or to dig it up from below, gave photographers a certain unifying quality: a kind of introspection, an appeal to the inner resources of the photographic medium. There were their own associations, groups of independent photographers, amateur clubs, but there was virtually no public ‘struggle’ against official art, no collective action of a manifestation nature. Accordingly, photographers did not receive such public attention as the ‘second avant-garde’ (non-conformist, independent, experimental, simply ‘other’ art). Their activity did not go beyond, as sociologists say, the ‘community of their own’. Nevertheless, they managed to bring photography out of the shadow cast by the ‘wall of ideology’. And, unlike the ‘pictorial’ second avant-garde, both status professionals, members of the club movement, and individual representatives of the underground participated in this process together.
The image of the ‘darkroom’, the dark room traditionally associated in the mass consciousness with photography, is appropriate here. Indeed, it was necessary to look deeper into this ‘room’ in order not only to identify the often unknown avant-garde photographers, but also to assess the qualities of new thinking in the works of quite systematic masters. In other words, a great deal of research and collecting work was needed to examine the history of Soviet and Russian photography from this angle of introspection. And that work has been done.
On Tuesdays in February, visits to the Centre of Visual Culture Béton will be free of charge!
The Centre of Visual Culture Béton presents the exhibition ‘Behind the Wall of Ideology’, which will introduce viewers to a surprising and still little-studied phenomenon – non-conformism in photography. The exhibition will include 76 works by Soviet and Russian authors who explored the boundaries of visual art in their work, seeking to free photography from traditional norms and restrictions. Among them are Valentin Samarin, Boris Smelov, B.U. Kashkin, Evgeny Likhosherst, Vyacheslav Tarnovetsky, Boris Kudryakov, Alexander Kitaev and many others.
Photography of the 20th century is associated, first of all, with reportage. It served as a mirror of reality – an instrument capable of capturing historical events in the most accurate and reliable way. Like art in general, photography was heavily censored. Nevertheless, a number of photographers allowed themselves to move away from the ideology of the political and to focus on the ideology of representation – solving aesthetic problems, searching for expressive resources of the medium, engaging in art for art’s sake. These challenges forced photographers to change their tools: using distorting mirrors, cameras that manipulated perspective, microscopes, X-ray machines, and camera-less photography. In these works, the emphasis is shifted towards demonstrating fanciful lines and combinations of colours, while didactic narrative is left aside. These works are similar in their focus to Rorschach tests, as in both cases the viewer is invited to bring their own unique meanings to the image, rather than following a predetermined framework of logical narrative interpretation of the works. Works such as Abstract Expressionist paintings are orientated towards the viewer’s own emotional experience, rather than imposing strict rules of communication along a set functional course.
‘Behind the wall’ of ideology, a strong movement of photographic art has developed. The impossibility to swing over this wall, or to dig it up from below, gave photographers a certain unifying quality: a kind of introspection, an appeal to the inner resources of the photographic medium. There were their own associations, groups of independent photographers, amateur clubs, but there was virtually no public ‘struggle’ against official art, no collective action of a manifestation nature. Accordingly, photographers did not receive such public attention as the ‘second avant-garde’ (non-conformist, independent, experimental, simply ‘other’ art). Their activity did not go beyond, as sociologists say, the ‘community of their own’. Nevertheless, they managed to bring photography out of the shadow cast by the ‘wall of ideology’. And, unlike the ‘pictorial’ second avant-garde, both status professionals, members of the club movement, and individual representatives of the underground participated in this process together.
The image of the ‘darkroom’, the dark room traditionally associated in the mass consciousness with photography, is appropriate here. Indeed, it was necessary to look deeper into this ‘room’ in order not only to identify the often unknown avant-garde photographers, but also to assess the qualities of new thinking in the works of quite systematic masters. In other words, a great deal of research and collecting work was needed to examine the history of Soviet and Russian photography from this angle of introspection. And that work has been done.
