publishedmedium:the calvert journal

#Trans-Siberian railway : I quit my job after an unforgettable trip across Russia — The Calvert Journal
▻https://www.calvertjournal.com/features/show/9483/trans-siberian-railway-journey-documentary-photography

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he Trans-Siberian railway has enticed not only travellers since it was first completed in 1904. For writers, musicians and filmmakers, the world’s longest uninterrupted single train ride promises a creative retreat on wheels. Bowie famously travelled the Vladivostok to Moscow route after finishing his Ziggy Stardust tour in Japan in 1973. Other creative minds to have traversed Russia in this way include English magical realist novelist and short story writer Angela Carter, whose journey went on to inspire her enchanting 1984 book Nights at the Circus, and more recently The Kills’s Jamie Hince locked himself on-board one of the train’s compartments to work on the band’s next record. For photographer Giulia Mangione, it had been an ambition to take the 9000 km train route from Moscow to Vladivostok since studying Russian as a student. After working on The Happy Show, her long-term photographic series on Denmark, she was looking forward to working on a travel project with a distinct beginning, middle and end.

#photographie #russie #transports #trains #transsibérien

High-wire : a vertiginous ride in Chiatura’s Soviet-era cable cars — The Calvert Journal

▻https://www.calvertjournal.com/photography/show/10327/chiatura-cable-cars-soviet-georgia-photography

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Chiatura, a once-booming mining town in western Georgia, won’t strike you as a quintessential tourist destination. The city’s only landmark is the Mgvimevi monastery, set on the edge of a natural cave. Chiatura’s main attraction, however, is “Stalin’s rope road”, a network of cable cars built in the 1950s to transport workers to the manganese mines in the mountains. After visiting Chiatura in 2010, photographer Lasse Ihlow returned in late 2017 to photograph the remains of the mining industry. “The only way I could discern that time passed was through the faded paint jobs on the houses and cable cars,” he reveals of a city where time seems to stand still. His photos show the farthest cable cars at the eastern end of the valley, where most of the active mines are located. “A majority of the working population is still dependent on the mining industry, which is in decline. The city is visited regularly by daring tourists who pass through for a thrilling ride on the city’s main cable car, before traveling on.” Few stay longer than a day, travelling in from Tbilisi or Kutaisi, sometimes only for a few hours. Though a ride on the cable-cars is a must, the photographer recommends heading to Chiatura for more than a flying visit: “Everyone is welcoming and hospitable, always ready to share their famous Georgian wine and talk despite the communication barrier.”

#géorgie #caucase #soviétisme

Power structure: why the architecture of the eastern bloc still looms large after communism — The Calvert Journal

▻http://www.calvertjournal.com/features/show/4036

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Looking back at it, I’ve been photographing architecture pretty much since my first black-and-white film roll at college. The first semi-amateur photo exhibit I put up consisted of studies of French Gothic cathedrals and pre-historic megaliths.

Growing up in Vyborg, formerly the second-largest city in Finland, which became Soviet territory after the Second World War, I couldn’t help but notice the differences between buildings and districts from the two eras. They clearly spoke different architectural languages, or, if you will, transmitted and implied different states of mind. Vyborg is layered from the medieval castle at its heart out through the old city to the panel housing at its outer limits. But the layer that has always caught my attention was somewhere in the middle — the slender and bare architecture of the 1920s and 30s, the Finnish functionalism.

The juxtapositions you find in Vyborg help you grasp the idea of multiple, simultaneous, politically defined modernities. Soviet modernism in this sense is a part of a larger architectural puzzle. Yet it is especially interesting because ideology, by twisting and fermenting itself within the architecture, has taken on some very curious forms. One of them in Russia is called the spetsobjekt, or “special object” — a factory, research institute, or any utilitarian facility vaguely related to military needs or to some shady branch of law enforcement. This was my main subject in BLOC. A spetsobjekt is a fenced-off compound that may have completely lost its practical or technological relevance, yet nobody is in a hurry to remove the security regime around it. These shells of secrecy with no content inside them are a very prominent feature of the post-Soviet city.

#soviétisme #architecture #urss #union_soviétique

The Jewish Revolution: how Soviet Jews pursued artistic modernity and political freedom after 1917 — The Calvert Journal
▻https://www.calvertjournal.com/articles/show/9236/the-jewish-revolution-soviet-jews-artistic-modernity-political-freed

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The extent to which 1917 was tied up with questions of anti-Semitism and Jewish identity in the former tsarist Empire is rarely discussed in the West. But this was one of the revolution’s most urgent and vibrant battlegrounds, politically and culturally. Since the late 18th century, Jews in the Russian Empire had been confined to the Pale of Settlement; the February Revolution that preceded October 1917 granted them the freedom to live and work throughout the country. Violent reprisals and full-blown pogroms became commonplace, particularly across the western borderlands of the collapsing Empire. The integration of Jews into the building of a socialist society was a vital part of the Bolshevik policy to afford equal rights to ethnic minorities.

Jewish life was one of the revolution’s most urgent and vibrant battlegrounds, politically and culturally

This was especially true in light of the conservative reaction against the Revolution, which played out in the Russian Civil War of 1918-1921. The “Whites” who pitted themselves against the Red Army (newly formed by the Revolution’s most famous Jew, Trotsky) were an internationally backed ragtag of forces ranging from liberal monarchists to nationalist extremists, and were responsible for a wave of pogroms alongside their skirmishes with the Soviets. Those who lament the Bolsheviks’ eventual triumph in the Civil War tend to elide the fact that a White victory would have meant bloody catastrophe for an already brutalised Jewish population.

#El-lisstsky #révolution_russe #urss #art #graphisme

Lost empire: Eric Lusito searched for abandoned Soviet military bases. What he found was amazing — The Calvert Journal

▻https://www.calvertjournal.com/features/show/6265

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When does it make sense to speak of the “ruins” of the Soviet empire? The pristinely preserved Lenin Mausoleum on Red Square or the luxury apartments in Moscow’s Stalinist “Seven Sisters” skyscrapers are clearly architectural artefacts of a former time but they have been retained and commodified. Indeed, most of the Soviet built environment is still in effect. Having been a titanic modernising force across much of the globe — with all the violence and co-option that this entailed — Soviet power has left thousands of buildings that are a part of the present as much as they are of the past, which cannot be said of true “ruins”.

#urss #ex-urss #soviétisme #union_soviétique #bases_militaires #photographie

Six photographers travel across states that once came under the dominion, or existed in the orbit, of the Soviet Union. Their stories evoke worlds both ordinary and stunning and raises the question of how long the shadow of the the past can be said to linger over the present.

Journeys — The Calvert Journal

►http://reports.calvertjournal.com/journeys

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A quarter century after the collapse of the Wall, what does the landscape look like for peoples of the former Eastern Bloc?

Here, six photographers travel across states that once came under the dominion, or existed in the orbit, of the Soviet Union. Their stories evoke worlds both ordinary and stunning and raises the question of how long the shadow of the the past can be said to linger over the present.

From the high mountains of Tajikistan to a failing mining town in Romania and the opulent homes of Russia’s newly rich, history, it seems, is never far away.

–—

Snow ghosts

Soviet military-industrial power frozen in time

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D

anila Tkachenko is a Russian photographer whose series Restricted Areas crystallises the tendencies of many artists working on themes of the post-Soviet space. As Calvert 22’s Power and Architecture season demonstrates, there is a healthy interest in the abandoned or neglected buildings that once served as landmarks of Soviet ambition: the rack and ruin of utopia. What sets Tkachenko apart is the unforgiving simplicity of his compositions.

The architecture of Restricted Areas is scattered across Eurasia: from an observatory in Kazakhstan to submarines in the Volga region of Samara and oil fields in the remote republic of Bashkortostan. But through Tkachenko’s lens they become part of a single winter landscape, minimal and saturated with whiteness.

#photographie #soviétisme #urss #ex-urss

photographer Alexander Gronsky spent four years capturing the patches of grass and sand on the city’s periphery sought out by Muscovites

Journeys — The Calvert Journal

►http://reports.calvertjournal.com/journeys

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Where do Muscovites go on a sunny day? The options for sun-seekers in the Russian capital are, it seems, limited. To create Pastoral 2008-2012, award-winning photographer Alexander Gronsky (Aperture Portfolio prize, Silver Camera Grand Prix) spent four years capturing the patches of grass and sand on the city’s periphery sought out by Muscovites — along with the towering apartment blocks, wires and cranes that thwart any attempt at Arcadian escape.

Gronsky, who was born in Estonia and now lives in Latvia, explores Moscow’s wastelands, neither urban nor rural, the peripheral areas on the outskirts of the city.

#photographie #moscou #rural-urban #espaces_intersticiels

Ukrainian Soviet mosaics: one final look at the spectacular street art of the past — The Calvert Journal

▻https://www.calvertjournal.com/photography/show/9114/decommunized-ukrainian-soviet-mosaics-photo-book-Yevgen-Nikiforov

Juste époustouflant.

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et d’autres.

Until recently, it was not unusual to come across bright, eye-catching masterpieces in mosaic on the streets of Ukraine, gracing residential blocks, facades of school, houses of culture, metro stations and bus stops. As with other Soviet relics outlawed by the Ukrainian government in April 2015, including the dismantling of a whopping 1,320 statues of Lenin, mosaics too have gradually begun to vanish across the country. Yevgen Nikiforov’s new book Decommunized: Ukrainian Soviet Mosaics, released by DOM and Osnovy Publishing, brings together over 1,000 of these stunning artefacts, which the Kiev-born photographer has been shooting over the last three years in 109 different cities in Ukraine. He found that those mosaics which have not already been destroyed are lost in the visual noise of post-Soviet cities. “Soviet monumental art had become a mere backdrop, as integral as the air we breathe, and equally invisible,” writes Nikiforov, who hopes his book will restore mosaic art to its former glory. Join us on Thursday 26 October 2017 at London’s Calvert 22 Bookshop, where you can hear Nikiforov talk about Ukraine’s recent “decommunisation” laws and how he managed to hunt down the last surviving mosaics, as well as preview more of the book’s stunning photography. The event is free, with a suggested £5 donation. You can purchase tickets and find out more here.

#ukraine #mosaïque #images #visualisation #propagande #soviétisme #urss #ex-urss #union_soviétique

#Andro_Wekua: discover how this Abkhazia-born artist is rebuilding his hometown from memory — The Calvert Journal
▻https://www.calvertjournal.com/features/show/9344/new-east-100-andro-wekua-abkhazia-hometown-memory-art-music

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Andro Wekua is one of the art world’s biggest mysteries, and obsessions. The Georgian artist fled war-torn Abkhazia in the 1990s with his family and has been based in Europe ever since. The past, however, is rarely the focus of discussions about his work. Rather, it’s the image of a sombre and enigmatic modernity, bordering on dystopian future, which comes through in Wekua’s visionary sculptures, installations and paintings. For the exhibition Some Pheasants in Singularity at Sprüth Magers gallery in London, Wekua created two sculptures of the same character, a young blond girl with a bionic arm, one where she is calmly riding on the back of a black wolf, and one where she is hanging passively by her chin from a rectangular piece of glass. The scenes evoke vague dreams birthed by the contemporary vortex of pop culture imagery, although they certainly cut deeper. Wekua has been exhibiting internationally since his mid-twenties – through the circuits Kunsthallen in Switzerland and Germany, and at Gladstone Gallery in Chelsea — and his output has always retained an eerie introspective quality, at the same time inviting the viewer to fill gaps in the narrative. It is worth mentioning that in 2011, for the work Pink Wave Hunter, Wekua did return to his native Sukhumi — although only virtually. He used photos sourced from the internet to create mixed-media replicas of buildings in the city, which turned out to have a ghostly presence of the erased history. The gaps and voids in the narrative, and the unexpected paths our minds follow to fill them, are perhaps his major preoccupations as an artist.

#art #géorgie #akbkhazie

Looking for Lenin: #Ukraine banned the statues - but where did they go?

Photographer #Niels_Ackermann has been looking for the monuments hidden away under new decommunisation laws. The Calvert Journal follows the hunt

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Inside Star City: Russia’s retro cosmonaut training facility – in pictures | World news | The Guardian

▻http://www.theguardian.com/world/gallery/2015/oct/21/russia-maria-gruzdeva-direction-space-cosmonauts-in-pictures

So typical...

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Inside Star City: Russia’s retro cosmonaut training facility – in pictures

Documenting the country’s space centres, photographer Maria Gruzdeva offers a rare look inside the secretive facilities, still in use today. The Calvert Journal reports

Maria Gruzdeva and Anastasiia Fedorova for The Calvert Journal, part of the New East network

#russie #espace #soviétisme #cosmonautes

Event horizon : scenes from the frontier of extraterrestrial exploration - The Calvert Journal
▻http://calvertjournal.com/features/show/4653

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Vincent Fournier’s Space Project explores humanity’s yearning for worlds beyond our own. Over the course of the project, the Paris-based photographer has visited the key terrestrial bases of space exploration: the cosmonaut training centre of Star City outside Moscow, the Baikonour Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan and Utah’s Mars Desert Research Station.

Mais pas que.
Site du photographe
▻http://www.vincentfournier.co.uk/site

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#espace #frontière #photographie #Vincent_Fournier.

Scenes from an otherworldly Russian film set – in pictures | World news | The Guardian

▻http://www.theguardian.com/world/gallery/2015/aug/25/under-electric-clouds-aleksei-german-film-in-pictures

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Scenes from an otherworldly Russian film set – in pictures

The Calvert Journal’s Oleg Savunov spent months documenting the making of Under Electric Clouds, an award-winning tale that imagines the country 100 years after the great revolution

#soviétisme #photographie #ex-urss

10 of the best photographers documenting post-Soviet life – in pictures | Art and design | The Guardian

▻http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2015/jul/31/photography-post-soviet-new-east-russia

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10 of the best photographers documenting post-Soviet life – in pictures

The Calvert Journal selects some of the most compelling artists across the new east, turning a lens on everything from lone arctic researchers to expectant parents

#soviétisme #photographie #ex-urss

Outside in: how foreign photographers see the post-Soviet world | World news | The Guardian

►http://www.theguardian.com/world/gallery/2014/dec/22/foreign-photographers-russia-post-soviet-world-in-pictures

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Outside in: how foreign photographers see the post-Soviet world

Russia maybe be under perennial scrutiny but it is a challenge to find photography that provides fresh perspective of the country, or its post-Soviet neighbours. Can outsiders offer anything new? The Calvert Journal profiles 25 international photographers who’ve turned their lens on the region

#soviétisme #photographie #ex-urss

New east on screen: the 25 greatest films since the fall of the Wall - The Calvert Journal
▻http://calvertjournal.com/lists/show/3797/25-films-since-1989-new-east-cinema

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The fall of the Berlin Wall prompted a seismic cultural shift across the eastern bloc. To commemorate its 25th anniversary year, here are 25 of the best films produced in the new east since 1989. Whether coming-of-age tales, family dramas, or social commentaries, this list attest to the rich — and often overlooked — contribution that the region has made to cinema.

#cinéma #new_east #est #mur_de_Berlin

Lost utopia: inside an abandoned Soviet mining town in the Norwegian Arctic - The Calvert Journal
▻http://calvertjournal.com/photography/show/2894/svalbard-ville-lenkkeri-place-with-no-roads-soviet-mining-town

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Finnish photographer Ville Lenkkeri travelled to the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard in search of utopia. Svalbard, which is situated in the Arctic Ocean, was once home to a Soviet mining community. In Soviet times the community operated on an entirely non-commercial basis, with free food and accommodation, like a microcosm free from capitalism. Since the collapse of communism, the coal-mining town has been largely abandoned, and as Lenkkeri found out, completely transformed. “My initial mental image of a place cut off from the rest of the world, and thus having a tightly knit community, crumbled quite quickly. This was no longer a place where people came to live and work due to force of circumstance, or where lonely people gravitated towards one another, forming a large family that makes it easier to cope with the long, dark winters or separation from loved ones”, he writes in his book The Place of No Roads. “The times of pioneering coal-mining enterprises and exclusive two-year work contracts were over for this town. People didn’t come up here any more because there was no work to be found elsewhere. They came to make good, fast money.” Although he failed to find what he was looking for, Lenkkeri fell under the spell of this distant northern land anyway. He captured perfectly the silence of the now-defunct municipal buildings, the serenity of the surrounding mountains and the dreamlike isolation of the remaining few who still live there. He proved that Svalbard was once a utopia, and, like any utopia, it ultimately failed to exist.

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▻http://villelenkkeri.com

Outside in: how foreign photographers see the post-Soviet world

Russia maybe be under perennial scrutiny but it is a challenge to find photography that provides fresh perspective of the country, or its post-Soviet neighbours. Can outsiders offer anything new? The Calvert Journal profiles 25 international photographers who’ve turned their lens on the region

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The cinematic allure of the Moscow metro
by Tomer Ifrah

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When Israeli photographer Tomer Ifrah entered the Russian capital’s underground for the first time he instantly fell under its spell – and spent more than three months documenting it. The Calvert Journal reports.

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Hide and seek: a rare glimpse into one of Russia’s last closed cities - The Calvert Journal
▻http://calvertjournal.com/slideshows/show/2626/photography-zarechny-russia-closed-city-ksenia-yurkova