Artist name: Masha Svyatogor

Nominated by: Rafal Milach (Polish visual artist; Nominee member of Magnum Photos)

Country: Belarus

Edition: 1 of 1

Collection

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Project statement

Kurasoushchyna is one of the sleeping districts of Minsk, the place where I was born and grew up. Unremarkable, displaying typical Soviet low-cost housing, a technical water reservoir popularly referred to as "a stink pot" and the railway, this neighbourhood began to develop its mythology in my imagination. I sometimes find it difficult to explain where this or that image came from or to draw a line between the reality and the play of my imagination.

Many of these works are related to my childhood memories and feelings, as well as relations with the city and modern Belarusian everyday life. In childhood, the typical and ordinary often becomes exceptional, full of mystery and magic.

The heroines of my series interact with the urban environment of Minsk and its suburbs in different ways. Some freeze in immobility and daze, in a state of drowsiness and melancholy immersing themselves in water like a dream, others hover in space, or escape from the city, flying or floating away from it. Attempts to build relationships with an alienated urban environment encourage heroines to blend in, fade into space, become part of it, assimilate, hide, find shelter, lay low. Sometimes the characters find themselves trapped, unable to influence the situation. The scenes, largely consisting of various elements of everyday life, seem surreal, irrational and phantasmagoric on the one hand. On the other hand, these bizarre combinations reflect quite some contradictions and paradoxes of Belarusian present-day reality.

Artist statement

In my artistic practice, I refer a lot to Belarus’ contemporary context and focus on eccentricities and paradoxes of everyday life in my country. My research is also aimed at reframing the Soviet past, exploring the ambivalence of the Soviet system and my relationship with the legacy of the USSR as a person who was raised after its collapse.

Each of my work, whether it’s a single piece or it’s part of a series, consists of many layers, patterns, ornaments, details and slices of reality, taken from the pictures photographed by me and transformed then into complex multi-layered narratives reflecting contradictions, inconsistencies and ambiguities inherent to modern Belarus. By combining elements of different historical and aesthetic traditions, I strive to reveal and convey a reality with a lot of different sides and facets, the relations that arise in this reality between objects belonging to different orders.

To realize my ideas, I often use photomontage techniques. For me, creating collage is not a mechanical gluing of random heterogeneous elements, as if accidentally combined with each other, but a way to tell a story or to glue/rebuild an existing story anew. As materials for my work I use my own photographs as well as archival images found in Soviet print media. I carefully collect and select iconic images of the Soviet era, especially those that are important historical artifacts, cultural symbols of that time and significant elements of collective memory.

Finding a new visual style and new aesthetic within the montage method is as essential to me as building a critical message and overcoming stereotypical thinking, preconceptions and predictability of reactions, providing an opportunity for wider interpretations without limiting the viewer.

By mixing seemingly incompatible pieces and fragments, I emphasize the strange and elusive nature of many things that I encounter in everyday life and observe in political, social and cultural environments. Through my works I express my confusion and controversial feelings about the past and the current situation in my country.

https://www.mashasvyatogor.com/