Utilizing different mediums in their depictions of post-Soviet Russia, Visiting Instructor in Art Sasha Rudensky’s ’01 wall-to-wall span of beautifully composed and saturated images and Russian artist Olga Chernysheva’s looped video projection entitled “March” (being simultaneously exhibited at the Zilkha Gallery) both foreground human experience while conducting investigations into identity: investigations governed by both rediscovery and reproach.
Located in a separate bay in the gallery, Chernysheva’s “March,” a surprisingly hysterical seven-minute film loop, highlights the inconsistencies and absurdities of a military-style celebration to sarcastically scrutinize the post-Soviet experience: boys dressed in guard uniforms, cheerleading pom-pom girls, an assortment of local dignitaries. Containing little but the sound of the parade and the artist’s unwitting subjects, the film’s stripped-down aesthetic further underlines the ceremony’s awkward and humorous adornment of power.
In her first major solo exhibition, Rudensky presents two photographic series entitled “Remains” (2004-2008) and “Demons” (2007-2008). “Remains” poignantly depicts the intimate details of everyday life in the former Soviet Union. These archaic relics of post-soviet Russian life range from a 1960s refrigerator to Orthodox Christian iconography to a Lenin statue that adorns the lobby of a bus station bathroom. In “Demons,” Rudensky’s Yale graduate work, she focuses on portraiture of family, friends and peers.
Looking through the photographs in “Remains,” one feels a sense of attachment to the places depicted. The images serve not only as reminders of the bygone Soviet age, but as a means for the Russian-born Rudensky to experience, remember and reconnect to a past that she wasn’t fully able to experience herself.
“There is a lot of nostalgia in this work,” Rudensky said. “There was a certain gap between this place that really informs you and in your mind, a place you think you’re from but really a place you don’t know.”
Photography, Rudensky explains, is the link that has allowed her to bridge that gap, and create more lasting associations with her homeland.
“I realized a lot of the reason why I was a photographer was because of the place I come from,” she said.
In spite of her obvious national pride, Rudensky says Russians often receive her melancholic pictures negatively.
“I think people actually don’t think of the pictures very positively because I think in it they see my attempt to show this darker, tragic side of this place, which I really try to avoid,” she said.
Nonetheless, the most striking feature of the series is the lack of human presence. Devoid of people, her photographs instead focus on deserted landscapes located (creepily enough) at the heart of some of Russia’s most populated cities. Still, the photographs are not without a trace of human life—although vacant, the spaces she photographs are abundant with evidence of recent human activity. One photograph, for example, depicts a bed with the paint of the wall worn off from its usage. It speaks to the progression of time and the remnants of human experience.
“[The photographs] are filled with people but I specifically wanted to not include them,” Rudensky says. “To me it is so much more poignant to think about the space that is filled with the lives of people without them being there.”