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2/6/2012

Partly Cloudy

Foundation Izolyatsia - Platform for Cultural Initiatives, Donetsk

curated by Olena Chervonik, Victoria Ivanova, and Dima Sergeev (IZOLYATSIA)

On 3 June 2012, IZOLYATSIA opens Partly Cloudy—a photography exhibition, which marks the final stage of the artists-in-residence program for photographers commenced by the foundation in 2011. The series on show—presented in the various warehouses of the IZOLYATSIA territory—are the final products of the research projects conducted by eight artists-in-residence: Richard Ansett, Nuno Barroso, Marina Black, Marco Citron, Homer (Sasha Kurmaz), Flavia Junqueira, Natalia Pavlovskaya, and Alexander Strinadko, during their stay in Donetsk past summer. The artists were asked to reflect on the concept of "partly cloudy" in relation to Donetsk as an ambivalent entity which may be perceived topologically, psychologically, sociologically, politically, aesthetically, anthropologically, etc.

Richard Ansett tells the story of human beings' inherent fragility. Ansett shows that while injuries and traumas are inflicted upon us through interaction with the outside world, healing can only come from within, as we emerge from denial and understand the power of our own agency. In Marco Citron's Donetskanschauung, the forest is a cocoon that engulfs the city, enveloping all traces of civilisation; green foliage becomes the ultimate context of existence, making the urban scene seem like a collection of temporary props.

Marina Black and Flavia Junqueira both follow an introspective trajectory, in which the artists instil their emotional worlds into foreign spaces. Marina Black explores her own history's parallel world through the prism of her sixteen-years-old heroine's subjectivity, which the artist projects into, appropriates, and employs in an attempt to resolve her personal disconnection to the physical and symbolic place of her hereditary origins. Flavia Junqueira's playful interventions in the dilapidated spaces of an abandoned Soviet Cultural Palace reflect the sentimental paradoxality that accompanies the passage of time.

For Nuno Barroso and Homer, the photographic image serves as orthography and punctuation in the creation of their narratives, which are simultaneously fictions and memoirs. Nuno Barroso is both the subject and narrator of poetic odysseys, in which romanticism and melancholy are as much narrative devices as they are imprints of the artist's personal emotional journey. Homer, the self-proclaimed enfant terrible, seeks out characters and situations, which tend to trigger a conditioned judgement of being socially and aesthetically misfitting. He taps into an aesthetic dimension that is both visually invigorating and comically therapeutic.

Natasha Pavlovskaya and Alexander Strinadko bear a special connection to the politics of spatial aesthetics. Pavlovskaya shows how hyperbolic over-saturation of kitsch has come to dominate today's urban environment, having aggressively infiltrated the blank spaces of the strictly regulated aesthetic austerity that was characteristic of the Soviet visual regime. For Alexander Strinadko, Donetsk is a home he never left. His compassionate depictions of the Other(side) of his native city—Budenovskiy Rayon, a locality he has never photographed prior to this project—are a testament to the power of compassion free of mind's colonialism: ability to find grace and beauty in the most resistant and rejecting environments without the act of self-seeking instrumentalisation.

Owing to the idiosyncratic nature of the IZOLYATSIA space, the series comprising Partly Cloudy are to be shown in a manner that not only reinforces their underlying idea(s) but also involves each space in an intimate, revelational gesture towards the exhibited works.

The Partly Cloudy exhibition is curated by Olena Chervonik, Victoria Ivanova, and Dima Sergeev (IZOLYATSIA).

Image: Richard Ansett, "Partly Cloudy," 2011. Design by Dima Sergeev, IZOLYATSIA.

IZOLYATSIA Platform for Cultural Initiatives
Svitlogo Puti St.3 Donetsk, 83085 Ukraine
Hours: Thursday–Sunday, 10–6pm

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