September 12 – October 27, 2007
NAILYA ALEXANDER GALLERY
24 W 57th St New York, NY 10019 USA
Unforeseen, a visual meditation on the notion of the Past.
The vintage prints from Soviet Russia, and three multimedia works by artists from the former Soviet Union.
The three contemporary artists Svetlana Boym (who is also a Professor of Slavic Languages and Literature at Harvard), Anna Frants (a curator and art critic based in NYC) and Igor Savchenko (also a writer based in Minsk, Belarus) interpret the Past from their personal perspectives.
For Svetlana Boym the notion of an unforeseen past is uncanny and unpredictable like the future. In My Family Album, 16‐second projections, made with a primitive multi‐burst mode in a digital camera, record the acts of touching family pictures. This syncopated mode dwells on the glare, cracks, and folds of the image, laying bare photographic errors, passing shadows, and haunting memories.
Anna Frants presents a freestanding video sculpture titled “Made in Greece, 1928” in which footage from the 1928‐1936 travels by a young cameraman Vyacheslav Burgov (who later became a legend of Soviet sound engineering) is projected on a Greek vase.
Igor Savchenko has long been captivated by the phenomenon of time and the past, an interest evident in his photographic investigation from the late 1980s and continuing through the mid 1990s. The toned gelatin silver prints in the show are from the series Alphabet of Gestures, Faceless, About Happiness, and Mysteria. Through appropriating old family albums and documents, he excavates fragments of a cherished past stored in our cultural memory, exploring their hidden secrets. He reveals the essence of things through gentle touches, lost expressions, fragile silhouettes, and accessories, creating a chain of sensations and clues that allows us to enter a specific state of mind or mood evoked by his selection of materials.