Review of the exhibition “House and Garden” in “GES-2”

The GES-2 House of Culture hosts an exhibition of photographer and artist Sergei Sapozhnikov “House and Garden”. The photographs taken by him at his home in Rostov-on-Don are complemented by video and audio dramatizations, specially written music and scenery elements that recreate the surroundings of a panel high-rise building, the interior of the apartment and the surrounding views. This was the area of ​​the artist’s daily life during the covid lockdown, but now it appears almost as a universal picture of the world. Tells Igor Grebelnikov.

The joke that the special operation defeated the covid quickly ceased to be funny, although there was some truth in it: today the exhibition referring to the pandemic will seem belated, since the world, as we are told over and over again, is threatened with a new death. So that, the past planetary disaster is now rather a pleasant memory: all the more so as the experience in general, no matter how painful it may seem, eventually begins to be perceived without emotional anguish, and from a scrupulous recall of details, their voluntary or involuntary connections, some kind of then a new puzzle. The circumstances and experiences of the lockdown three years ago have faded considerably against the background of subsequent events, but Sergey Sapozhnikov undertakes to restore their brightness and gives them a powerful timeless scale – such is the strength of that initial artistic impulse that arose in the quarantine lock.

Then the photographer began to take detailed pictures of the world available to him: the interiors of his apartment and the entrance of the house, the views from the entrance windows, window sills with flower pots, the nearby square. It would seem that pictures could not be more banal, but at the exhibition at GES-2, this tour of the house and its surroundings appears as a visual saga, a kind of performance in which the viewer also participates.

There is an irony in the title of the project “House and Garden” (curated by Vladimir Levashov and Elena Yaichnikova): it refers to the famous British magazine House & Garden. The publication seems to glorify the most important value of English culture – the house, the personal space of a person, and his private piece of nature – the garden. In fact, the magazine mostly consists of collections of deserted interior or landscape shots, of course, impeccably executed. Photos of Sapozhnikov are also deserted, and although his small apartment in a Rostov high-rise building, like the public garden “in the district”, is terribly far from the standards of British glossy magazines, at the exhibition they are exceptionally worthy.

The monument with a bicycle frame at the entrance to the exposition looks like a parody of an equestrian statue, but in fact it refers only to the author’s passion for cycling. On the outer wall of the exposition is a black-and-white video with a character wandering around the park – you start to follow him, get involved, although nothing special happens. The exhibition is built as a series of spaces: an entrance with a protruding elevator shaft, stairwells, rooms, a kitchen, a balcony, at some point you find yourself in the garden again, although you have not left the apartment. Each of these spaces is hung with photographs – sometimes just in a row, and somewhere the pictures become photo wallpapers, on top of which, again, photographs hang, forming visually complex palimpsests: views of the park are superimposed on views of the park or on interior shooting, and the sky turns out to be under your feet. And sometimes these are such perfectly shot shots that House & Garden never dreamed of: you can’t take your eyes off the trees and thickets of the square, silvering in the sun, as well as from the interiors of a small apartment, as if exfoliating in a multi-colored neon that has arisen from nowhere. Sometimes the visual attack is replaced by a relative calm: in the interiors there are videos (their author Dmitry Tsupko) in which the residents of this apartment (it is assumed that two men and a woman are the alter ego of the artist) simply live their lives, as if they were not being watched by a camera, but where their conversations suddenly sound, sometimes music (piano pieces for the project were composed by the composer Alexei Hevelev). The viscous motif of the installation is photographs of the windows in the entryway lined with pots of flowers: unsightly tropical plants, designed to remind of the earthly paradise, even to embody it, as if hung in some kind of languor.

Moving from room to room, shifting your gaze from frame to frame, from huge prints to tiny Polaroids, from brightly colored frames to black and white, from home to garden, balancing in different emotional states, you involuntarily transfer your inner “look” to their personal experience, and not only pandemic, but wider – everyday, immersed in the routine of life. Even stomping around in the very limited space of this conditional apartment, you feel it as a portal to an endless world, and these pictures – corridors, walls, windows, trees – can not let go for a long time, like a good performance. You have not expected this from photography for a long time – apparently, it needs to change roles more often.