Exhibition: Evgeny Molodtsov. Vepsian forest.

[spb_row parallax_image_height=”content-height” parallax_image_movement=”fixed” parallax_image_speed=”0.5″ parallax_video_height=”window-height” parallax_video_overlay=”none” row_overlay_opacity=”0″ vertical_center=”true” width=”1/1″ el_position=”first last”] [spb_text_block pb_margin_bottom=”no” pb_border_bottom=”no” width=”3/4″ el_position=”first last”]

FotoDepartament presents a new exhibition:

Evgeny Molodtsov. Vepsian forest.

From 10 December 2016 to 2 February 2017

Место: FotoDepartament / 24, Vosstania str. / Fligel space / 2nd yard / 1 floor

Opening of exhibition: 10 December, Saturday 18.00

At the opening will be carried out an artist-talk “From irony to sincerity”

During the last century people feel huge difficulties defining the relation to geographical space, what let some experts speak about new kind of  “nomadism” and “nomadic identity”. Such roaming the world is somehow unnatural, it deprives a man of social connections and stable identification. Often the governments interfere in the regulation of the process, accelerating it and assimilating whole nations. There were many reasons why people were being deprived of their belonging to their home in Russia and the Soviet Union. They had to leave their native city or country. The Civil War, the Great Patriotic War, repressions, widespread Soviet building projects and other crucial points have become the reasons why there is a low level of local/district identification of people in Russia.

During the last three years I have made four long travels through the original centre of Vepsian settlements – the Vepsian forest, examining the abandoned villages. Vepsian assimilation (from the beginning of the 20^th century – abt. 30000, now – abt. 6000) was came largely because of the forced assimilation policy of minorities in the end of 1930s, government activity in 1950-60s, which was directed to reform  the traditional rural settlement system (the liquidation system of the “unpromising” villages), and because of administrative and territory separateness (the abolition of Vepsian national districts in Leningradskaya Oblast and the Republic of Karelia in 1938). During my journey to the abandoned Vepsian villages, I was literally embedded in space and time, I “reformed” it by projecting archive century-old photographs made in these places on the tumbledown log huts. I reached out to the Vepsian mythology, epos and rituals, was holding myself out as a Vepsian and tried to experience the folk hurt anew, retraced the path Vepsians left the forest. My intervention somehow echoed the government activity, it was repressive towards both me and the place. I was a person without any local belonging, desired to grab another’s identity, history, pain of the Vepsians. What for? Such aspiration is impossible. I believe that the association between someone and his motherland or roots is a necessary requirement to self-identification even in the age of the “tourists” community development.

[/spb_text_block] [spb_text_block title=”Artist-talk: From irony to sincerity” pb_margin_bottom=”no” pb_border_bottom=”no” width=”3/4″ el_position=”first last”]

My generation grew up in vague atmosphere of the 90s watching the Simpsons and South Park, which put into our minds such integral establishments as irony and postmodern cynicism. However, currently I see how society is tired of postmodern deconstruction, irony, relativism and nihilism and is coming back to the lost sincerity and universal values. Hesitation, sincerity, hope, new romanticism, search for truth, reconstruction, surrealism, penchant, return to the universal concepts and ideas, all these terms are close to me. Moreover, my last work is based on them. These terms are also combined in the popular concept of metamodernism. Why “meta-”, not post- ; who introduced the term, what is the theoretical basement and what are the examples of metamodernism projects in the field of art, and photography especially, – that is what I want to talk about in my artist-talk.

[/spb_text_block] [/spb_row] [spb_row parallax_image_height=”content-height” parallax_image_movement=”fixed” parallax_image_speed=”0.5″ parallax_video_height=”window-height” parallax_video_overlay=”none” row_overlay_opacity=”0″ vertical_center=”true” width=”1/1″ el_position=”first last”] [spb_text_block pb_margin_bottom=”no” pb_border_bottom=”no” width=”1/1″ el_position=”first last”]

[/spb_text_block] [/spb_row] [spb_row parallax_image_height=”content-height” parallax_image_movement=”fixed” parallax_image_speed=”0.5″ parallax_video_height=”window-height” parallax_video_overlay=”none” row_overlay_opacity=”0″ vertical_center=”true” width=”1/1″ el_position=”first last”] [spb_text_block title=”Evgeny Molodtsov” pb_margin_bottom=”no” pb_border_bottom=”no” width=”3/4″ el_position=”first last”]

[/spb_text_block] [/spb_row]