Exile
Exile changes how a place is seen — in departure and on return.
Escape to Emigration
Political circumstances compelled me to leave Russia in 2022. Over the next eighteen months I moved through Kazakhstan, Thailand, Turkey, South Korea and Ireland. I walked through unfamiliar cities with a camera, unsure which of them might become a place to live, or for how long. The photographs began as a way of looking, before I could understand what the journey was becoming.
Returning to the archive, I read it as a phenomenology of exile. Religious images, political signs and scenes encountered in the street acquired new meanings against what I had left behind. A familiar symbol could appear in another culture with an entirely different history; an ordinary view could suddenly bring distant political power into focus. The photographs follow this unsettled act of interpretation: the attempt to read a new environment while one's own position in it remains uncertain. Exile here is neither a route nor a sequence of temporary homes, but an altered relation to place, belonging and an unknowable duration.
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Return Ticket
All the photographs in Return Ticket were made in 2026, when Ksenia Belkova and I returned to Koh Samui for a holiday. In 2022, the island had been one of our first refuges after leaving Russia. We spent hours doomscrolling news feeds, counted every expense and did not know where we would go next. Yet memory preserved Samui as a place of relief.
The return did not repeat 2022. It gave me the distance to construct images for feelings I could not then photograph. Ksenia appears alone beside a boat, in water or lit by her phone at dusk; a towel, an unfinished meal and an unmade bed mark a presence just outside other frames. A small face made from a banana and flowers offers an imaginary companion. These images do not document our first stay. They use the island's seductive beauty to give loneliness, anxiety and disconnection a visible form.
The ticket establishes why we came back; the work asks what came back with us. A freely chosen holiday remains shaped by the experience of an earlier departure that was not free.
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- Solo Exhibition«Escape to Emigration»Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences (Shaninka)Moscow, RussiaApril 18 – July 31, 2024