HIDDEN PT.1

Photography series, wall and semi-gloss paper, metal frames, sound installation, October 2022 Vitamin B, TOBE Gallery x MOME, July 2023

Nowadays, lots of people try to hide: some of them run from political situations, others try not to be caught by flying bullets, thirds want to become invisible for tracking systems, and fourths go to forests. Every attempt to hide becomes a ‘game’: we disguise ourselves like animals whose camouflage technique is their colouration. Instead of caves, we have bunkers, instead of pits – trenches. The forest becomes a place of reconnection with an animalistic desire to escape.

HIDDEN is my reaction to what was happening in Siberia during the mobilization in Autumn 2023: people, especially men, started hiding in the forest from the recruitment office. This work became the visual research of how to ‘remain unnoticed’ on different levels. Natural locations like caves, mountains, fields and forests remind us of archaic places for hiding. Rethinking the prehistoric roots of this action, I place myself in the state of self-preservation as animals do when they notice an enemy. The long exposure lets me disappear. The image of the bunker becomes a second layer of meaning, in which the animal world intersects with the echo of the actual geopolitical conflicts.

The forest in HIDDEN is a counterpoint of philosophical aspects. connecting all visual and verbal elements the image of the forest refers us to Ernst Jünger’s manifest ‘Forest Passage’, where he reflects on political pressure, the concept of freedom and the possibilities of resistance in the modern world. The sound installation is generated via AI technologies and contains the summation of my Russian friends’ recorded answers to the question: ‘How do you hide in the current political situation?’ AI manipulations became peculiar censorship, hiding the voices which are still recognizable but non-understandable.

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