Space, ritual, event

The photographer is a hunter for visual events. Often his trophies are the images of well-known social rituals. A person has to go through a series of such events throughout their life, including birthdays, weddings, funerals, mass rallies, and queues. These form a ritual framework for a collective essence of our life. A person is always part of a collective event, and their participation is linked to the collective unconscious.

"Where there are three of you, I am among you". These Christ's words introduce a link between a person's spiritual essence and the collective form of their existence. Modern culture has been actively involved in a new visualization of world history, for example, in historic movies. Modern technologies make the past visual by displaying battles and other spectacular historic events, which obscure repeated day-to-day events in which small regular or accidental groups of people take part.

In this respect, the photograph's take is less dependent on the market demand for visual images. The photograph is one of us. As a private individual, the photographer may belong to a group of people but will be separated from it, at the same time.

Their job is to find an angle, which will enable them to display the individual as something not yet assimilated by the collective. Any mentality or nation creates special recognizable types of collectives. The objective of the exhibition project "A private history of the collective" is to visually analyze the kinds of collectives typical of Belarus. Whatever is said about the Belarusian mentality, one can see and understand it by being part of a crowd in the street or at a soccer game or sitting in a library's reading room or having dinner at home with one's family. Collectivity is an intrinsic part of our life.

The photographer's task is to make collectivity visual and follow the emergence of a subject and their assimilation in the collective.

City squares are considered spatial centers of the world. Independence Square in Minsk is a spatial emptiness potentially open for political protests, demonstrations or mass entertainment. Daniil Parnyuk has been able to follow a subject's response to the potential of Independence Square. The photographs display an old woman holding a red flag and wearing a red coat who is moving across the square in a weird trajectory. The entire series helps to understand the logic of her movement, which is the logic of filling the space. The spatial logic becomes congenial to the personal logic of the subject. The space of the square is absolute in its closure, being sort of a link with the collective subconscious that interrupts our imaginary loneliness.

Exploration of impersonal quietness is also present in the works by Sergei Zhdanovich displaying close-ups of faces on the verge of sliding into impersonal out-of-focus darkness that absorbs the link between them.

Attention should also be paid to Viktor Strelkovski's excellent work in a series on the Zhirovichi Monastery. People's behavior in sacral spaces is subjected to rules based on a different, transcendental, cosmic order and vertical loneliness whereby a person looks up to God. At the same time, ritual combines "vertical" prayer with "horizontal" secular concerns.

Ritual

Here we are looking at a bride tasting bread before the wedding ceremony in a photograph by Viktor Butra, people visiting their folk's graves at a dying-out rural funeral in the Chernobyl zone pictured by Anatol' Kliashchuk, a military orchestra in an Afghan desert photographed by Igor Peshekhonov. Peshekhonov also photographed a session of a military tribunal, and the picture is similar to a hidden-camera shot, displaying a lonely figure of the defendant, the court and the silent mass of the public, forming a Kafkian triangle of collective identity. The hardly distinguishable mass of the military that fills the desert in compliance with someone's order illustrates the irrational of people's masses.

Unlike Peshekhonov, Valery Savulchik hides a ritual in the semi-darkness of relations, links and touches, using cold and alienated manner.

Tension in children's faces from Sergei Kozhemyakin's "Children's album" is created by the procedure of taking pictures and the outfit, which creates a context not clear to the children.

Secret mechanisms of ritual are hidden behind society's symbolic words, are visualized in photographs as a system of figurative relations whereby secrets present reality created by photography itself rather than existing reality.

Event

The wedding ceremony pictured by Brushko puts the spectator very close to the subjects, nearly inside the movement, which glues people together in a conglomeration of carnival gestures and looks that are almost as strong as gestures. Savchenko's "Dreams of a joint interior" turns into orgasmic tension, and the intrusion of erotic bodies into his "On Happiness" results in the disappearance of ideas in a series of weddings and funerals to re-emerge in day-to-day life, as displayed in the shining of shields that reflect the photographer by Viktor Sedykh, in family chronicles of day-to-day life by Dzianis Ramanyuk, or in a group portrait of Polish soldiers by Igor Poshekhonov, in which faces disappear in time. An individual face gives place to collective existence.

Is it that we're unable to see the faces or the faces cannot see us from their distance, which is located very close to us?





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translated by Vladimir Kozlov