"Drawing from archival photographs, facts, and personal memories, the project investigates the roots of uncertainty and the landscapes of collective memory. "
Artist: Katya Selezneva
Project: There Round the Corner in the Deep
"In 2022, my homeland started a full-scale invasion of another country, marking a new round of global confrontation. I am searching for gaps in the dominant narrative of the past to better understand the frightening present.
The story unfolds around the mythology of a closed city—both the place for the development of nuclear weapons and as the spiritual center of Orthodoxy. Named after a swampy river, for a long time the city was associated with a saint- hermit who lived in a forest cell. Later, during the Cold War era, the figure of the wonderworker was replaced by a new protagonist, the nuclear physicist. Today, it's a city in Russia where religion and science, faith and militarism are intertwined. It remains in a transitional state between the past and something entirely new and unknown. The Russian government openly claims that Orthodoxy and nuclear technology are aligned, reinforcing the nation's strength and security. The boundary between fact and fiction becomes less and less visible. "
"My grandfather was one of the scientists who thought he would go to the city for a year or two, but stayed there for the rest of his life. I never knew him, but inherited his archive of film negatives. He was a passionate photographer, yet, due to strict secrecy, he never documented anything directly related to his work. Traces of the context appear only as scratches, burnt spots, and abstract overexposed frames.
By weaving together images from my grandfather's archive, photographs I have taken in and around the city, and staged imagery, I invite the viewer to reflect on the instability of memory about the past and the impact of our actions in the present. Moldy, spoiled by time, and treated with acid, the photographs become a metaphor for the cyclical nature of religious and state imperatives of the world we need to reinvent. "
© Katya Selezneva