Translated material
Special order
Two exhibitions of the parallel program of the Moscow Photo Biennale
The current photobiennale is an anniversary one. It is useful to talk about problems that have been brewing for ten years. In my opinion, the main thing is the lack of invited curators with a clear strategic plan and goals. Olga Sviblova, of course, carries out a great cultural mission: she regularly introduces Muscovites to the main names in world photography. However, it is still difficult to call the Moscow Photo Biennale a conceptual project: the best exhibitions, as a rule, are removed from the walls of European museums and exhibition halls, or rented from funds and archives. The hits of the Moscow Biennale are mainly retrospectives (currently they are Brassaï, Nan Goldin, Sebastian Salgado, about whom our newspaper wrote, as well as Jan Saudek, about whom we will write more). Still, I would like to see more projects at the festival that were made specifically for it. Then the key themes (this year there are three: “Journey”, “Temptation” and “Conflict”) could take an unexpected turn.So far, most of the parallel programs are responsible for innovation. Among the special orders made for the Biennale, two were memorable: “Travels” by Natalia Nosova at the Central House of Artists and “Hands of Power” by Mikhail Mikhalchuk at the Andrei Sakharov Museum and Public Center.
The exhibition of debutante Natalia Nosova would fit perfectly into the program “Europe through the eyes of Russians,” which is exhibited in the ruined outbuilding of the A.V. Museum of Architecture. Shchusev. In both cases, this Europe looks like a picture from the magazine “Around the World” or “The World”. It is surprising that Mrs. Nosova, by her own admission, who picked up a camera a year ago, is not inferior to masters of the level of Lev Melikhov, Valery Sirovsky in the tenacity of the eye, the ability to capture that same Barthesian punctum (an injection in the nerve, a notch on the retina, the main lure of any photograph). , Alexandra Slyusareva. Here are the jazzy syncopations of bright umbrellas on a sad empty beach. Or highway signs: “Europe” written in Russian and crossed out at the top, “Asia” in the same Russian letters at the bottom. On the street of a big city, among a pile of discarded soft toys, a little girl stands. And indifferent office workers in black glasses scurry around... Exactly seen coloristic rhymes: red piles in the water - red bottoms of boats... Or a guessed plastic rhythm: seagulls - pegs - reflections of water... Nosova turns out very beautiful world and very touristy. Designer Sergei Mironenko also tried to make it this way: along the length of the extended wall of the mezzanine of the Central House of Artists, the photographs are placed in one strip, joint to joint - the result is a trajectory of vision from the window of a rushing bus. Opened vintage suitcases purchased at a flea market, painted white, are attached to the pylons: on the inside of the lid and on the bottom there are photographs that are particularly attractive to each other. The viewer also gets a lively and pleasant “suitcase mood”.
The view of the world from the window of a tourist bus is charming, but lightweight, almost devoid of authorial reflection. That’s why the collection travel experiences of many photographers are so similar. They equally sweetly and vigilantly see the funny pantomime of life and exotic surroundings. But a personal view appears where the frame holds time in its development, becomes a full-fledged history, biography and/or destiny: among the photographers of the Magnum agency, for example, or among the famous Italian Mimmo Yodice, whose exhibition “Mediterranean. 1990-1995" opened one floor above in the same Central House of Artists. By photographing completely tourist objects - archaeological exhibits of the ancient Mediterranean, and then processing photographs using the most complex author's method, which involves achieving the finest tonal gradations, Jodice achieves the disembodiment of images that seem to elude the tangible eye. This wounded, chipped, half-erased flesh of ancient culture, which ideally wants to be transformed into a pure substance of light. This is the view of a great photographer on the most touristic nature. So the talented Nosova in her travels can only wish to find her own “point of view.”
Mikhail Mikhalchuk's exhibition is not at all spectacular. In the stylishly shabby exhibition hall of the Sakharov Museum hang - swaying on fishing lines - photographs of the hands of employees of the city government. The famous photographer Mikhalchuk once took official photographs of these mid-level administrators, and then separately printed only the managers’ hands, mostly folded on their knees, palms down, or clasped together. Curator Alexander Panov believes that the hands betray some kind of nervousness of the model positioned in front of the lens. Rather, the viewer feels nervousness when he finds himself in the surreal space of the swaying hands of Themis’s servants. Hands - with or without rings, with nails varnished or crookedly cut - for the most part are absolutely, terribly expressionless. And this is the main shock of the exhibition. She becomes another emblem of Justice, a symbol of the blindfolded goddess Themis, impenetrable to feelings and emotions, faceless and punishing.
In terms of the strength of the fear experienced at the exhibition of being a victim of the Kafkaesque apparatus of power, the exhibition can be compared with another project of the Photobiennale - the photo series “Judges” by the Frenchman Christian Courrèges (Apothecary Order of the Museum of Architecture). In Courrèges alone, twenty judges were photographed in the genre of ceremonial portraits with robes and wigs. They look at you impassively and primly, and, being cross-examined by their views, you involuntarily draw your head into your shoulders.