Calvert 22 Foundation
Calvert 22 Foundation was set up about ten years ago to celebrate the culture and creativity of the once-communist nations of the former U.S.S.R. and Eastern Europe. The term they use to cover all these countries is ‘the New East’, meaning the countries of Eastern Europe, the Balkans, Russia and the former Soviet states of Central Asia.
Calvert 22 is a not-for profit organisation which aims not only to promote art, film, photography, fashion and other cultural activities from the region, but also to stimulate debate and discussion. Hence the busy schedule of screenings, talks and debates (details on their website).
As well as the London headquarters and exhibition space (Calvert 22 Space) they publish the Calvert Journal (an online magazine of New East contemporary culture) and organise the Calvert Forum (a think tank for the New East, focused on research and policy for the creative industries).
Oh, and the name? it comes from the address. It’s located at 22 Calvert Avenue, London E2 7JP.
Post-Soviet Visions: Image and identity in the new Eastern Europe
This is a group show of photography by a young generation of artists from the former USSR and communist countries, namely Russia, Georgia, Germany, Latvia, Poland, Russia, Ukraine and Uzbekistan.
Most of them were either born or came to maturity after the collapse of the USSR in 1991, and grew up amid the ruins of their grandparents’ communist dreams. Now they were no longer members of the socialist vanguard but teenagers and young people just like anywhere else, except poorer, living amid the crumbling infrastructure of impoverished states, and above all completely disillusioned with their heritage and culture.
Kids in America or Britain or France, for all their complaints, have a history of democracy and high ideals which can certainly be mocked, but do have some basis in fact. We do live in relatively affluent societies which respect human rights, women’s rights, LBGT+ rights (compare and contrast with Putin’s Russia). And teenagers here have money and jobs and fashion and records to spend it on.
What did the USSR achieve to be proud of, apart from get invaded by Nazi Germany and then fight him back at gigantic cost in lives and treasure? But after the slow declines of the 1960s and 70s, after Brezhnev and Andropov, after the years of stupid war in Afghanistan, after drunk Boris Yeltsin and the sell off of state industry to a new generation of utra-rich oligarchs – where has all this left its children? Those not fortunate to be born into the nomenklatura or mafia families, have been chucked on the scrapheap.
The result is that the photos of all the young people here, no matter which country they’re from, convey the same sense of aimless futility. It’s all high rise alienation – teenage vodka parties, tacky tattoos, bad attitude, and cheap rip-offs of American music and clothes.
The photographers
Jędrzej Franek (Poland)
Frankek is the executive editor of Stacja Poznan, a cultural, architectural and design web platform. He is project manager of the Poznan Design Festival. He’s represented by three big colour photos of buildings, the best of which (below) has a strongly romantic vibe, giving his stranded high rise buildings the glamour once associated with mountains in the mist. That said, these high rises could be anywhere – Brooklyn, Gdansk or Sheffield. It represents an international style of alienation.
Jędrzej Franek
Dima Komarov (21)
Born in 1997 in the Mari El Republic, in Russia, Dima is a self-taught photographer and Post-Soviet Visions is his first major exhibition. He’s represented by eleven roughly A4 size colour pics of his mates, a gallery of poor, pissed-off teenagers. What struck me is how 70s and 80s their clothes were. If the New East is meant to be at the ‘forefront of fashion’ (as the introduction to the show optimistically claims) it’s going to have to try a bit harder than this. I think I had a tartan-lined windcheater like the one below way back in the 70s, and there’s a great shot of a surly skinhead wearing a Ben Sherman shirt straight from the 1980s. These could be early photos of provincial youth by the English photographer Martin Parr.
Dima Komarov
David Meshki (39)
Meshki was born in 1979 in Tbilisi, Georgia. After gaining an academic degree in photography, he worked as a photographer for major Georgian cultural magazines. His first solo show consisted of photographs of skaters and athletes taken in his native country and he went on to co-direct the award-winning documentary When Earth Seems to Be Light, based on these photographs. He’s represented here by five photos (2 black and white, three colour) of skater dudes with their trademark long hair and cut off jeans. The photo below – probably the best in the exhibition – which has been blown up to fill an entire wall. Way to go, Georgia dude.
David Meskhi
Apart from being spectacular photo, it’s also an obvious symbol, showing unstoppable youth with, all energy and fearlessness, transcending the crumbling concrete infrastructure of the junk countries they’ve inherited.
Patrick Bienert and Max von Gumppenberg
These guys have been working together since 2007. Travelling between Germany and New York, they ‘explore concepts of culture and identity’ grounded in the heritage of street and documentary photography. The nine black-and-white and five colour photos here, of sullen youths and crappy townscapes, are described as ‘a love letter to the rave scene in Kiev’. The best of them show a really rotted, decaying urban environment.
Patrick Beinart and Max von Gumppenburg
Genia Volkov (37)
Volkov was born in the Crimea (then still part of the Ukraine) back in 1981, and educated at the Institute of Journalism in Kiev. He became a self-taught multimedia artist. He’s represented by three big colour photos, highly stylised, two of them taken at night of hands reaching out or a scattering of star-like fireworks. His use of unnatural lighting effects sets him distinctly apart from the overwhelmingly naturalistic photorealism of all the other snappers.
Genia Volkov
Armen Parsadanov (36)
Born in Baku in 1982, Armen has lived and worked in Kiev since 2013. He’s represented here by thirteen black and white prints, unframed and taped to the wall so that they look like the results of a photo shoot with fashionably wasted youths and blonde models, taped up to be selected by a magazine editor. Tatts, tacky t-shirt, most importantly heroine-chic skinny, if you goggle ‘alienated youth’ you get articles from the 1990s, 25 years ago. The ‘new’ East is just catching up.
Armen Parsadanov
Masha Demianova
Demianova studied journalism and creative writing before turning to photography. She’s represented by two neat rows of three A4-sized black and white photos. Apparently, she is ‘a pioneer of the female gaze photography movement in Russia’, ‘challenging prevailing notions of female sexuality and desire’. So the shots are of naked women in non-sexy poses, standing on a jetty or squatting on a tree.
Masha Demianova
The most striking one for me was unrelated to female desire, a shot of multiple car headlights on a motorway in a thick fog, although cars looked at by the female gaze obviously look completely different from cars looked at by the male gaze.
Grigor Devejiev
Devejiev ‘is a photographer with over a decade of experience working in fashion, whose atmospheric, gritty pics have been included in international fashion magazines including i-D and Metal’. He’s represented by three big, A3-sized colour photos of shabby-looking people in threatening poses in really run-down horrible buildings. The full crappiness is brought out by the use of flash which projects cheap shadows behind the dodgy-looking characters. Note the horrible grey plastic macs.
Grigor Derevjiev
Hassan Kurbanbaev (36)
Born in 1982 in Tashkent, capital of Uzbekistan, Hassan was educated at the Tashkent State University of Arts. He began his career as a cinematographer, producing short films focusing on social and youth issues. He’s represented here by a series of colour photos of pissed-off Tashkent teens, part of his Tashkent Youth project. Apparently, Tashkent is one of the youngest cities in the world, with 60% of the population under 25. This young lady doesn’t look too thrilled about it.
Hassan Kurbanbaev
Ieva Raudsepa
Born in Latvia, Raudsepa is now based in Los Angeles. Her photographic work has been exhibited and featured internationally, including in i-D, YET, Latvian Photography Yearbook, FK Magazine. She’s represented here by 13 colour and two black-and-white photos, all of different sizes and arranged higgledy-piggledy so that some are overlapping. (I enjoyed the way the photos of each of the different photographers were hung, placed and arranged differently on the walls.)
Raudsepa is the only photographer who takes photos of landscapes. Most of her snaps still feature the same cast of gangly, alienated youths, but they tend to be taken on mossy banks or by lakes. One or two feature no people at all, so I’ve chosen a misty morning landscape for the sake of variety.
Ieva Raudsepa
Michal Korta
Korta was born in Poland and studied German philology and photography. He has been working in photography for more than 15 years, working with press, advertising agencies and international cultural institutions, and is a lecturer on photography in Poland and Switzerland. He’s represented by four lovely black and white photos of the weird, brutalist, concrete architecture of Skopje in Macedonia, from his Beautiful Monsters series. All four are marvellous. What extraordinary buildings!
Michael Korta
Paulina Korobkiewicz (25)
Korobkiewicz was born in 1993 in Suwalki, Poland and is now based in London. She gained a first class honours degree in Fine Art Photography from Camberwell College of Arts and has also attended the Warsaw School of Photography. In 2016 Paulina was the winner of Camberwell Book Prize. She doesn’t appear to do people at all. Instead she’s represented by five big colour photos of aspects of buildings – the serried balconies of apartment buildings, the locked door of a nightclub in the grim morning light, fog half hiding some local shops.
Paulina Korobkiewicz
Pavel Milyakov (30)
Born in 1988 in Moscow, Pavel attended Moscow State Academy of Art and Industry, working with graphic design and then Moscow Film School. Post-Soviet Visions is his first exhibition. As far as I could see he was represented by one work, an enormous blow-up of a comedy photoshop he’s done of The Hunters in the Snow by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, but with modern apartment blocks added in. Works amazingly well. It’s blown up onto an enormous scale which makes it all the wittier.
Orehovo by Pavel Milyakov
The videos
I nearly missed the fact that there’s a downstairs space, containing a few more photographers, a display case of photography magazines – but most importantly a projection room in which 11 videos from film-makers of the New East were playing on a loop. These are different from and in addition to the photographers.
Most of the films feature more shots and stories about alienated youths – in one, kids get drunk in a park, smoke fags and share vodka, before going along to a shabby disco where they throw up or snog and fondle each other. In another video, two skater boys skate through the wreckage of their crappy town, lie around in a cemetery, then end up having a fight in a graffiti-covered underpass.
One is a sort of mock documentary with a voiceover in Russian explaining the contemporary rave scene, how and why alienated youths go to big warehouses, deliberately don’t eat much, but smoke and drink to excess in order to encourage a sense of delirium, and dance all night to electronic music.
The standout film for me was Lake, directed by Vita Gareskina, in which several Iranian-looking women (actually from Georgia), dressed in dark robes and then wearing glittering masks, carry out some kind of ritual by a lake which involves torches and – as far as we can tell – the ritual drowning of one of them. This stood out by dint of being one of the few films with any aspiration beyond recording skater board, vodka-drinking, trying-on-trainers, teenage times.
That said, my favourite was this video – Jungle With Fiction by KayaKata. On reflection, maybe because – as a professional music video – it simply had higher production values than all the others and so was more watchable. But also because –although I think they’re taking themselves seriously – I found it hilarious the way these dudes in some crappy post-Soviet town copy the style, movements and attitude of black rappers from South-Central LA.
Like almost all the other kids, youths, skaters, rappers, party goers, drivers and fashion victims captured in this exhibition, it’s hard to avoid the feeling that – far from innovating or creating any kind of ‘new’ fashion, music or scene – all these young people trapped in dead-end towns in the former communist countries of the East are hopelessly copying every aspect of the wealthy Western lifestyle they can get their hands on, twenty years after it’s been and gone in the West.
The meaning of ‘post-Soviet’
For according to the exhibition blurb, the term post-Soviet ‘has become a byword for bold, innovative creativity in cultural fields from high fashion to film’.
To those of us outside the bubble of fashion and film, ‘post-Soviet’ is a byword for economic collapse, falling life expectancy, epidemic alcoholism, a tsunami of organised crime, the rise of billionaire oligarchs, and the triumph of Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian rule.
All fourteen photographers are interesting in different ways – some of their work is striking, all is to a high professional standard – but they all tend to gravitate towards the same central issues, of urban decay and youth alienation.
What is post-Soviet culture? It’s a big subject and one – with a newly re-elected Vladimir Putin continuing to goad and test the West – which requires investigation and understanding.
If the photos and videos focus overwhelmingly on youths with no apparent jobs and little apparent involvement in the social structures around them, if they offer no political or economic insights into the world of ‘the New East’ – they do at least put faces, voices and sounds to the younger part of the populations of this huge region, populations which are coming, in our time, under the control of a new generation of authoritarian and intolerant politicians.
Related links
The exhibition is FREE but note that Calvert 22 is CLOSED on Mondays and Tuesdays, and open Wednesday to Sunday only from 12 noon (until 6pm).
- Post-Soviet Visions: Image and identity in the new Eastern Europe continues at Calvert 22 Foundation until 15 April 2018
- Calvert 22 website
- The Calvert 22 Journal
Books & Boots 