The Other Shore NIKITA PIROGOV ADDITIONAL READINGS INSTALLATION VIEWS OF VARIOUS EXHIBITIONS

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1 The Other Shore NIKITA PIROGOV ADDITIONAL READINGS INSTALLATION VIEWS OF VARIOUS EXHIBITIONS

2 // NIKITA PIROGOV: THE OTHER SHORE. THE TELEGRAPH, The Other Shore is a poetic diary charting moments of desire, despair and bewilderment. The series portrays elements of Pirogov s own wilderness - his silence, playfulness and melancholy. He takes us to places where people seem to be in limbo, at a loss about where to go, bemused by pain or indecision. They express the sensory fog of numbness where after years of frustration their sadness becomes beautiful. Why is it that we are drawn to the misery of others? Is it that in the suffering and desolation of others we find our own truth? Perhaps it is that happiness breeds a blandness that creates a sense of loss of authenticity in our lives? Pirogov, like the poet Alexander Ilianen, is someone who explores the idea that although life can be difficult and tragic, the very nature of momentary existence is what helps us to appreciate beauty. Born in St Petersburg in 1989 he grew up with his grandparents in the Kuban the steppe region of Southern Russia. Pirogov loved to be lost in the fields, ravines, and streams there. I was impressed of the endless territories of it. i was watching how everything is growing, flowering, ripening, and then dies. In many ways, my pictures are the result of a collision of memories of idyllic harmony with nature as a child with an impression from the aggressive (physically and mentally), urban environment, in which I now live. The sequencing of these dreamlike works perhaps can be related to the Russian poetry and folk tales that have had an influence on the photographers imagination. One poem, Andrei Returns Home, full of Russian history and mysticism by Faina Grimberg describes a vanished man. The people who loved him were looking for him, walking for a hundred years, crying their eyes out, hoping they will find him or the tree he may have been transformed into or the river that speaks his name... but they do not find him, he is not there, only silence. LOUISE CLEMENTS Extract from 1000 Words Magazine

3 // CURATOR S NOTE. ARTOTEKA GALLERY (BRATISLAVA, SLOVAKIA), IN CONJUNECTION WITH MONTH OF PHOTOGRAPHY CURATORS: EVGENY BEREZNER, NATALYA TARASOVA, IRINA TCHMYREVA Other shores. There is one shore and there is another. Between them there is a river. A father standing on the sea shore tells his son that there are other shores over the sea, There is a shore of life where everything is familiar, and there is another shore The wax paleness of the characters of Nikita Pirogov is similar to the perfection of marble statues. Slender hands and white faces of the young men. They are deathly pale. They demonstrate that they are alive not with healthy rosy cheeks but with pulsing blue veins on the arms and the temples. Pulsing. Pulsars. The characters of Pirogov resemble stars that are far away and cold, but still alive (we can guess that by the shimmering of the light coming from them to us). Presence of other shores, other very distant life is something unknown, insolvable and beyond our concept of life, the cozy lamp light by the fireplace and the warmth of the home. The young Nikita Pirogov grew up on the verge of two lights: that of the south where he spent his childhood and where the colours of nature and the vital forces abound so that any depreciation (such as illness, or youth) looks dangerously fragile as opposed to the luxuriant life. The south in its richness and fertility is ever adult. (It is adults that we consider wealthy and successful). The second light is the wan light of Saint Petersburg. It could be called the light of the north. However, its sickly nature and the consumptive paleness doubled by the grey and yellow architecture of the city is different from the transparent light found in the deep northern forests. The light of the northern city is not just a stamp of anemia on the faces as it also accentuates the structure of everything, be it a corner of a house or the angularity of the cheekbones of the young. As much as there is no south without north so there are no adults without young people. It is only the antithesis that makes us believe that there is something that becomes evident and sharp against something other. We can define an object by cutting off all the nons and denying everything that this object is not. Then again, we can present an object surrounded with nature and define anything contrary. There are adults and there are young people. There is life and there is a transition between them, a leap. Not a smooth motion from one to another but a qualitative change, a change of character. Observation of a transformation, however long, cannot provide a viewer with a sure understanding: there is one thing which becomes another, temperature rose, the light changed, but in general, how can one have become another? The collection of pictures of Pirogov is like a miracle, where poetry is born out of the heap of daily sketches and portraits of those who are nothing but characters. Is it in juxtaposition of individual symbols? When one looks at each of the pictures they can see the poetry inside, they can see it in the details. Is other shores a sail? A smooth transition, getting older? The character of Pirogov lulled to sleep by the waves wakes up adult one day. Like Per Gunt, he looks in the mirror of the waters and sees a distance that separates him from the other him as he had been before. The youth is near, and it is inaccessible as its another extremity which is the perfect nature of a marble bone dried out with time. Other Shores is a sail between the past which can only be approximated in the unsteady reflection of our memory, and the definite future which also cannot be realized consciously (as there is nothing human in it). IRINA TCHMYREVA

4 // MAIN FEATURE: NIKITA PIROGOV, EIKON MAGAZINE, The Other Shore, the title of a work by Nikita Pirogov that represents the starting point for this text, is conceived as a spatial installation. Image after image placed alongside one another, the work forms a circular installation. And we say image after image, for at issue here are both photographs and videos that regardless of their media difference inscribe themselves in a shared movement of images, motifs, and perspectives. This circle of images seems to have no beginning and no end. There is no last and no first image. Together they describe a loop, that is, a return that pursues not so much a repetition, but rather a turn. Those who follow the pictures walk along a curve and turn around in a circle. Standing before the images, we remain surrounded by them. To return to the title, The Other Shore speaks always of another shore that is never reached, because with every choice of a perspective on the panorama what stands opposite us appears as the other shore. The gaze that turns towards an image or a segment of the staging turns in the same degree away from the other images, which it then misses. The history of the panoramic gaze that stretches back to the late eighteenth century and can be identified with Michel Foucault s perception of the panorama as a figure of surveillance undergoes yet another spin. Instead of being able to see and watch over everything from a central point, Pirogov here plays with a panoramic gaze that always misses something in its turning, and be it only the gaze of the whole. The gaze onto the whole remains a phantasmatic figure, an imaginary variable. The staging insists all the more on detail, on the individual image, be it a photograph or a video. In the context of the panoramic, the individual image proves to be a fragment. But fragmentarily against the backdrop of the whole, the detail insists on the image itself as a whole: a moment, a face, a gesture, a portion of a landscape, the weather, a rock in the water, a young girl in the water, a face, that surfaces from the water, a smile, a couple that hugs one another, a question in the face, a room: a dance of fragments that makes us forget its fragmentariness. Even the videos, despite the minute and minimal movements, seem to be moving images, yet ones that take place in a time loop, turning around themselves. They seem like photographs that learned from film to apparently move, and yet not a film, but remain moving photographs. The form of the circular hanging of these images, their adjacency, answers the question of their movement and turning on another layer. For example, more or less noticeable axes or perhaps cautious lines run through all the images, here a horizon, there an arm or a path that moves from image to image in a wavelike movement. In this sense, the images do not follow a series, no closed narrative. Each image tells its own story, and emancipates itself from a narrative that wants to provide a reason for the image other than itself. This balance of the fragmentary and the imaginary whole, snapshot and an awareness of the revolution as the surety that each image is followed by another characterizes the work of Nikita Pirogov, who was born in St. Petersburg in His experience as a performer and dancer and his training at the Department for Film and TV Direction at the Saint Petersburg State Theater Arts Academy promote this choreography and his mise-en-scene consisting of details and movement. Just as he directs in order to inscribe the images in a spatial order, he also relies to a great extent on detail: here, the relation between focus and lack of focus, there the isolation of a motif or the mere gaze on the scenic. This awakens reminiscences of the still life as well as an impression of documentary interests. The relation between proximity and distance complements the act of turning in the circle of the installation. The act of perception itself becomes a dancing figure. Viewing and dancing, focusing our gaze and turning our head are here conceived as synonyms.

5 Through the impression that the various motifs and movements overlap, a space of the symbolic is opened beyond the narrative layer of each individual image. The problem is now not so much what is symbolized, but the very fact that something is being symbolized. What appears here is a symbolic layer that refuses to symbolize anything. This absence is itself present in the space of the symbolic, a present absence. This means that the work by Nikita Pirogov not only stages a space, but evokes a specific form of presence in space, which includes absence in that space. The Other Shore is never reached. What remains are media representations that appeal to the symbolic to the extent that they represent a space, a location or moment that is pushed by a factual representation to the other shore. The act of photography then means to enter into something be it our own lives to become in so doing absently present. The Other Shore is then not a subject or a metaphor, but an attitude. ANDREAS SPIEGL