IN THE DARK PLACES | April 2021
IN THE DARK PLACES
Solo exhibition
Space Place Gallery, Nizhny Tagil, Russia
April 2-16, 2021
Brief intro
My project IN THE DARK PLACES is about the connection between places and the past, between memory and landscapes, and about trees that silently remind us that the past is never gone.
Project description
While language often tends to text over external and internal reality, photography leaves a gap through which one can look at that which eludes words. The series IN THE DARK PLACES explores the relationship between landscape and memory. On the one hand, traumatic events, rarely remembered, have left cracks, fissures, even physical scars in the landscape that transform the present. Such often idyllic places, remembering evil events, can preserve an uneasiness similar to the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. On the other hand, landscapes can evoke traumatic images in memory while simultaneously calming them. The series asks what can be learned from landscapes about trauma and recovery. Many of the shown photographs were taken at places that have been sites of crimes or battlefields in the past. Thus, the photographs depict landscape not only as something visible, but as permeated and shaped by the invisible – whether the invisible manifests itself in the form of a buried past or as a projection of one’s own memories and soul landscape.