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Archives: Reviews
«A book like a masterfully performed classical piece. As a matter of fact, the refined rationality of following the rules of the photobook is what makes this edition on Venetian paper and in wonderful print that elegant. An émigré from the Soviet Union, Pedan finally published his first album 20 years after he’d become a well-known photography teacher in Sweden. Just as he shaped his emigration, his whole bookis a conscious return back, and a look forward, consisting of duplications and relished moments and the world’s irregularities. It has travel photographs mixed with types of compositional constructions, light, geometry, visual motifs — no longer signed — which present precise images of Western and Eastern Europe. And among these accurate rows are hidden blends — ‘East-like’ images of Germany and Sweden, ‘Westlikes’ from Russia. Only the virtuous performer can afford to violate narrative logic this much, since he has all the clues in his hands»
«Twilight has been criticized as a norm for a few decades now. But in Misha Pedan’s book stereo_typ you actually understand the joke of having a “you” by his side. Pedan’s monochrome and pastel-colored photographs were shown a few years ago in an exhibition on Gallery Icon, and appear here in duets, two and two on each lookup. Hand in hand like love couples. Each slide duo is taken in one place, from Grythyttan to Minsk, and is cut by black lines. Only the preface, written by author Mara Lee violates the dualism: it is translated into three languages, except Swedish even English and Russian. Sometimes the photos take minutes after each other – like the pictures from Gothenburg, where the sunlight slowly moves over a green sofa. In other cases there is an eternity between a train car in Vitrysk Vitebsk, full of winter fur and caps, and the image next to, perhaps taken through a window, of a flock overlaid the Soviet gubb monument. It’s a form that violates the idea that photography alone will capture the magic moment, the Kodak moment. Here things happen in joints, distances and relationships. Time is not still It has only been found to exist. I’m excited to keep that one picture first, then get an aha experience when it’s changing, grows, with its other side»
«Misha Pedan‘s “The End of La Belle Epoque” offers us a remarkable testimony of life in Ukraine, during the last few years of the era of socialism. The design of the book itself is quiet classical and gives it a solid feeling like the feeling of a traditional (pre-digital) family album. What makes its design extraordinary, is the way it is enveloped in a cardboard file, reminiscent of the burocratic files in which the Soviet regime contained the lifes of all its subjects. But, the real thing about “The End of La Belle Epoque” is the extraordinary way in which these subjects of the CCCP have been portrayed. We could learn a lot about this portrayal in an insightful essay by Irina Sandomirskaia that accompanies the book. Irina Sandomirskaia notices that the pictures in “The End of La Belle Epoque” were made while the USSR was collapsing, while the empire’s grand aspirations, its striving after a brilliant future, its militant spirit of class struggle, had already long retreated from daily life. The social landscape was irreversibly decaying and evaporating. Most Westerners did not know it yet, but “the Reds” had relaxed their iron muscles on their own people for good. And, what were the subjects of Misha Pedan up to in this end-of-times context? Sandomirskaia observes that they are surrendering themselves to a dolce far niente, to a sweet idleness of doing nothing. They seem not to hold themselves any longer accountable for or attached to anything. There is a sense of quiet contentment ruling. Misha Pedan’s heroes are giving themselves to those modest enjoyments which their grand epoch used to forbid them and which the time of stagnation is offering in abundance. Sandomirskaia than lucidly outlines that Pedan’s heroes embody a soft kind of anarchism. She describes this anarchism as the subversive power of leading one’s life as a modest feast – a life that “has disentagled itself from the clutch of the historic law”. The Soviet regime was, according to her, completely powerless towards this bum like attitude of its subjects. She relates the powerlessness of the Kremlin towards Pedan’s heroes (or bums) to the powerlessness of the polis of Athens towards Diogenes, who was only looking for some bodily pleasures on the agora. Pedan’s heroes are not traumatised by the catastrophe of the downfall of the USSR nor excited by the hot and revengeful spurs of the liberal revolution. We believe that Pedan’s focus “on a festive mood laced with a slight hangover in an unpretentious enjoyment of the present” is truly something unique. It would have been far less surprising to our eyes to see only the miserable, grey and frustrated faces of a generation that has bitterly lost the cold war. But, Pedan’s focus also raises another and maybe a more important question. Where are the Ukrainians standing now? After 25 years of exposure to neo-liberal temptations from the EU and after the raise to power of Russian oligarchs, who are even more cynically neo-liberal, it seems that the Ukrainians could not keep the spirit of soft anarchism. Lenin was downed in Pedan’s hometown last week! Today, we are witnessing violence, riotting, destruction and even war. Could it be that the current rulers, whoever and wherever they may be, have learned their lesson and have closed all spaces for soft and wise subversives like Diogenes? We will not answer the question yet but, in a next post, we will come back to Misha Pedan’s noble bums and the anarchistic poetics by which he has portrayed them!»
«Endings carry a certain weight – a call to reflect, and the knowledge that something different is about to begin. The End of La Belle Epoque, a new book from Ukrainian photographer Misha Pedan, transports us to Soviet Russia between the years 1986 and 1989, the precipice of the collapse of the Union. Before even opening the book, the title provokes our loyalties and values – by bestowing the label of a ‘beautiful era’ to this period of time so directly, it becomes unclear and arguable whether Pedan means the beauty as genuine or ironic. The accompanying text acknowledges the duality in perception: “The fall of the Soviet regime, according to one perspective, is the central revolutionary event of our time; according to another, it represents its greatest geopolitical catastrophe.” And so we dive in. With Pedan as our guide, we walk the Soviet streets in 92 black and white images, catching sight of a small babushka in headscarf carrying a bucket, then horsing around with a group of construction workers as they break from digging up a sidewalk to have an ice cream, and later being ignored by a man and woman as they sit on a ledge sharing slugs off a glass bottle. Taken mostly in Kharkiv, the images also show scenes from St. Petersburg, Moscow, Odessa and Poltava – though the locations are not readily distinguisable from each other. In many images, we see scenes and fashion that are quintessentially Soviet Russian – for outsiders, icons that offer a clear demarcation of exoticism, like the Russian fur hat and the concrete jungles of communist block housing. Other images portray symbols of the ‘80s that are more connected to Western pop culture – like young women with feathered hair and stone-washed jeans – delivering a firm sense of the transition afoot. Though nostalgia is somewhat inherently driven by the experiences of one’s own culture, the book manages to express a more generalised notion of nostalgia well. Displaying the images with the film’s black borders left intact, capturing small moments of interaction in the street and collecting a certain amount of relaxed joie de vivre in the people he encounters, Pedan shows us something of a sweet life that we might not have experienced, but we would have liked to see. The book itself, lined with a kitsch pattern of illustrated men rowing through geometric blue waters, not to mention the vibrant red coloured edges of the book, draws us into the emotion of the place and time. Enclosed in a thin cardboard slip-case, titles printed in Russian and English, and sealed with a small cloth ribbon, the book’s craftsmanship and attention to detail is also reminiscent of times gone by. It’s a welcome and precious object. Of course, like all nostalgia, the bad bits are omitted or seen through eyes obstructed with fondness; essentially, we’re looking through the rose-coloured glasses of a Ukrainian who has been based in Sweden since 1990. Like images showing an idyllic childhood, we know there are many things left out, or scenes which take on a new interpretation in hindsight. Though there are images of soldiers, images of children playing on tanks, and the infamous grocery queues, there’s lightness rather than weight. As an outsider to this experience, this is not the Soviet Russia of the ‘80s that you might think of, but perhaps for this reason, it’s worth taking a stroll along the street with Misha Pedan in the midst of the beautiful era»
«”Кінець прекрасної епохи” — це своєрідне повернення в радянські часи, при тому що моє покоління долучилося до розпаду Радянського Союзу і цій події ми, природно, зраділи. Але, переглядаючи старі негативи, я відчув не просто ностальгію за місцем і часом, а сам час, який був дуже плідним для митця. Тоді, якщо ти щось робив, то винятково для себе. Це певною мірою кінець моєї епохи. Не знаю тільки, чи всіх це стосується»
«M is a book of photographs made by Misha Pedan from 1985-1986, taken during his lengthy daily subway commute in Karkov, Ukraine. M opens with an introduction by Vagrich Bakhjhanyan that immediately sets an unusual tone for the book: it is not the traditional introductory essay intended to shed light on the photographs and the artist who made them. Pedan’s photographs are not mentioned at all. Instead the piece is a fantastic account of the city of Karkov, so far removed from reality that it becomes more of a poem or piece of short fiction than an academically useful window into the pictures. Its fanciful nature calls into question the veracity of the photographs to come. The eighty exquisitely reproduced photographs following Bakhjhanyan’s essay are all made in the confined space of a subway car. Although it is not stated anywhere in the book, the subjects appear unaware they are being photographed, so it seems safe to conclude Pedan’s camera was hidden from view. Whether this was an effort to get truly candid shots or a consequence of the political reality of Soviet-era Ukraine is unclear. What is clear is that he was able to capture some remarkable images of his fellow travelers. Whether through a technical or aesthetic requirement, Pedan has used long shutter speeds, which introduces significant motion blur to the images. This creates a real sense of energy and movement on the Ukrainian subway. The people are alive and moving, the train car is shaking, the scene out the window is clear or distorted — these are not frozen fractions of a second for studying, there is a visceral sense that the viewer is bouncing along with the passengers. Throughout the book, many of the facing pages are diptychs of the same scene, made with two different exposures. On the left panel two out of four people will be blurry from motion; on the right panel three are frozen in place, while one individual glances around. This convention sets up a cinematic progression of time and movement through the subway cars. American audiences will immediately think of Walker Evans’ body of similar work made in the late 1930s, Many Are Called, which was published in 1966 and republished in 2004. Although both works share the formal conceit of the hidden camera recording anonymous photographs of passengers on a subway, that is where the similarities end. Evans was interested in showing what riding the subway looked like while Pedan shows what it felt like. It’s unclear whether Pedan was aware of Evan’s work in 1985, and there is no information in M to indicate Many Are Called made it through the Iron Curtain. But there is a visual cue towards the end of M that may indicate Pedan was aware of Evans’s work when he sequenced these images for publication: the accordion player. Pedan dedicates six pages, more than any other subject, to increasingly blurry images of a man seated between two women playing an accordion. It is easy to see this as a tip-of-the-hat to Evans’ earlier image of a subway accordionist, and therefore the larger similarities of the two bodies of work. M is an engaging book that appeals to multiple spheres of the photography world. Formalists will appreciate the aesthetics of the images, the play of light and dark, blur and focus, while ethnographers will be engaged by the character, dress, and bearing of the residents of Soviet era Karkov. Although it certainly stands on its own, it also is a worthy companion to Many Are Called»
«Eternity, presence — the two terms have just as often appeared as opposites as they have been taken as mutually implicative: opposites, because the present is already gone when we attempt to grasp it, whereas the eternal is the unchanging, that which never comes to be or passes away; implicative, since what is present somehow always aspires to step out of the flux of time, as if the Now would of itself demand to be sustained in view of the eternal that is always there, always present, as if fulfilling the promise inherent in the now. Together these two terms have thus been taken as the very summit of temporal experience in a way that escapes ordinary time, or forms the non-temporal kernel of time itself. In the language of medieval theological discourse this would be God as a “standing now” (nunc stans): a God who is at once absolutely alive and absolutely dead. Ever since its inception photography has surely inherited some of this, and it has had its fair share of metaphysicians and theologians, positive as well as negative. From the first intimations of a “writing of light” that would inscribe luminosity on a surface, stabilizing and recording its flickering and evanescent coming and going, through the various claims about a seizure of essential moments in documentary practices, up to the meditations of Roland Barthes on the punctum as a particular way of touching us beneath the conscious and intellectual level of the studium, time, in all of its guises, has been a key issue. Unlike painting, which constructs its own peculiar temporal and spatial frames, and has forged a wide array of techniques for extending the present backwards and forwards, photography throughout most of its history, notwithstanding its infinitely varied techniques of cropping, editing, montage etc., with respect to time remained axed onto a present understood as already given outside of its apparatuses. If painting derives from imagination, photography is subservient to a reality, no matter how elusive, that it must catch and bring to a stand; its moment precedes it, it is given beforehand in the irreducible reality of space-time, which is something other than a motif or a model. This may be construed as a weakness, as in many of the earlier polemics against the new art form, with Baudelaire’s diatribe in his 1859 Salon on “The Modern Public and Photography” as the most vitriolic one, where photography, precisely a mechanical art that lets its matter be given to it, was perceived as a key factor in the the destruction of the imagination; or it may by understood as a unique capacity to let us sense the very movement of passing away, of inescapable death and loss, and to dispel the illusory eloquence of the imaginary telling us that the transfigured object can in fact preserved and made eternal. If the Now of painting extends before it as the place of a future spectator who comes to occupy it and actualize the work, the Now of photography seems to lie behind it, in an always already lost object whose eternity is also a tomb. This opposition between an inescapable link to a pre-given reality and the superiority of the imagination as the “queen of the faculties” (Baudelaire) has since long been understood in terms of indexicality and causality, which would stand opposed to mediation and symbolism. And while such oppositions no doubt have beome blurred beyond recognition in the digital age—and were probably never sufficiently thought through in the first place—they might still be useful, this time not in the sense of once more underwriting a defunct division of the arts, but rather as elements of a poetic, as a way of conceiving works irrespective of any claims about mediums. From the outset photography invaded painting just as painting invaded photography, both of them trading places and exchanging their operative metaphors and techniques, as in the case of photography’s emulation of the compositional conventions of academic painting in order to attain the status of fine art, just as inversely the idea of the index as a trace of a contact with the outside (hand, gesture, body etc., all of them understood as signaling the involuntary and mechanically causal as a sign of truth) would become a key element in the evolution of modernist panting. Misha Pedan’s Eternal Presence may seem remote from such concerns. Consisting of a series of eighty-four photographs, taken at various locations and mostly showing us everyday scenes from urban life, it appears to align itself with a documentary aesthetic and a discourse of photography as the art of extracting a crucial moment from the flow of time. The images are however infiltrated by another presence, that of a fellow artist, Jan Håfström, whose earlier work The Eternal Return is overlaid, subtly and sometimes almost imperceptibly, onto Pedan’s own. That Håfström’s series bears a similar—although from the perspective of the philosophical tradition significantly transformed—name as Pedan’s, seems to set up a particular resonance between them, two series crossing and intersecting, without merging into a third unity. And while the reference to Nietzsche’s idea of the eternal return (my most abyssal thought, as Nietzsche himself said) is no doubt there, it is difficult to decipher. What is that returns in Håftström, eternally, and furthermore returns again inside Pedan’s images, as if the return would itself return? What we encounter in Håfström could be understood as fragments of childhood memories whirling by, drawn from comic books and cartoons, a circle of signs that revolves around a lost center of memory. A key figure in Håfström’s series, which is an open work that changes is format and specific content with each presentation, is not incidentally the enigmatic Mr. Walker, also known as the “Phantom,” or “The Ghost that Walks”—someone who returns as a ghostlike presence, a revenant who is neither wholly present nor absent, as if a figure of a memory or a lost Thing that returns to haunt us in mature life, a childhood that perhaps never existed as such, but which insists in our adult existence precisely by returning. In Pedan’s work, fragments from Håfström’s (itself fragmentary) work reappear in settings that seem oblivious of this enigmatic insistence. These elements, Pedan notes in an interview, “blend so well into our civilization” that it’s sometimes “practically impossible to figure out where they are in my pictures.” And yet, even though we may at times be unable to detect them, their virtual presence produces a subtle sense of dislocation, in ever so slightly shifting our focus. What or who is this Thing that intrudes in the everyday cityscape? Perhaps we might understand it as a contemporary echo of Baudelaire’s experience of nineteenth-century Paris, whose entry into modernity brought forth memories, vestiges of pasts that refused to go away and futures than never had taken place, and yet insisted on haunting the place: “Swarming city, city full of dreams, / Where specters in broad day grab the passer-by! (“Fourmillante cité, cité pleine de rêves, / Où le spectre en plein jour raccroche le passant”) But while Baudelaire’s city was caught between a past that wouldn’t let go and a future refusing to be born, which produced a series of phantasmagorical intermediary creatures in architecture, in the world of commodities, and in the new culture of display (all of which would be later famously understood by Walter Benjamin as dimensions of “passage”), Pedan’s city seems at first to be eternally present, revolving around itself and its everyday activities. We see people waiting for a bus, drinking coffee, taking selfies, or just passing by; it is a world made of tiny slices of life that do not appear to point beyond themselves. But as we soon discover, here too, there are ghosts that enter the scene, this time from another fictitious world, from another artist’s imaginary, itself in turn drawn from the imaginary world of cartoons and comic books. However, these modern visitors do not like their nineteenth-century predecessors grab or seize the passer-by, but are more like silent witnesses, unseen spectators that remain on the fringes of our space without demanding anything of us, sometimes just in the form of marks on a wall or reflections in a window. In this, they are neither simply real nor unreal, neither existing nor not existing; they float in the space of the virtual, the space of doubles, reflections, halos, illusions, which is also that of the ghost: its power to scare lies in that it occupies the sinuous line that separates the existent from the non-existent, and perpetually crosses over between the two without ever settling down. In this they also produce a certain “visor effect,” as Jacques Derrida once noted in his commentary on the ghost in Hamlet: does the armor surrounding the ghost belong to the ghost itself or the world of everyday objects? The specter needs to wield a certain materiality in the world if it is not to simply evaporate, simply not exist, at the same time as this materiality, the armor or any other coating that is wears, becomes “spectralized,” dematerialized or virtualized, as it is drawn into the strange intermediary sphere of the visitor. The visitors or witnesses in Eternal Presence do not seem bring us any fateful messages from the past; the father-king, dead or alive, is not an issue, and the Prince of Denmark is no longer called upon to decide whether he should take his revenge or not. Instead they might perhaps be taken to signal a particular drift inside our urban space: if they “blend so well into our civilization” that they sometimes become undetectable, it may be because this space is itself becoming increasingly fictionalized. The city of our present seems always to border on fiction, and it is increasingly replete with virtual technologies, ranging from computer and smartphone games to various surveillance and detection devices that superimpose new levels on its physical appearance, and renders the real more like a double of itself, or just another layer of images. If the city is made over so as to appear photogenic, from the outset waiting to become an image if itself; the visor effect is as it were diffused over the whole of perception, and in the end, in the act of looking at these images, we may ourselves be called to act the part of the visitor»
Дмитро Кавсан. Резюме. Дослідниця – Ксенія Малих
Дмитро Вадимович Кавсан народився в Києві 28 грудня 1964 року в родині біохіміка Вадима Мусійовича Кавсана та лікаря-онколога Наталії Сергіївни Картавової. З 1981 року навчався в Київському державному художньому інституті (нині — Національна академія образотворчого мистецтва й архітектури) на факультеті монументального живопису в майстерні професора Миколи Стороженка. У 1983 році разом з однокурсниками був призваний до лав Радянської армії, […]
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Марина Скугарєва. Резюме. Дослідниця – Катерина Яковленко
Марина Скугарєва походить із родини київських інтелігентів: її мати, Ольга Леонідівна Гарицька, працювала журналісткою, а батько, Вадим Костянтинович Скугарєв, — архітектором. У 1974 році дівчинка вступила до Республіканської художньої середньої школи ім. Т. Г. Шевченка. Перед тим вона відвідувала курси живописця Давида Мірецького (нар. 1939, Київ, український живописець, згодом представник української діаспори у США). Скугарєва вчилася в одному класі з […]
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