Anastasia Khoroshilova : Russkie

“Russians” (Russkie) are not a nationality, a country, a way of life, a religion, or a community. They are a vector of history and science that was studied by the artist both before and after Perestroika and then completed by an insight into Russia from Europe and, in the last two years, several special trips in the European part of the country, the Urals, and the Russian North.

Khoroshilova hasn’t been searching for her “Russians”, nor has she identified them; rather, she recognized them somehow and accepted them as they are. Russians always gaze straight into our eyes, but the looks on their faces are never directed by the artist. The characters are not part of some mythology – they are shown just as they would have presented themselves.

Among multiple identities of each of the characters, there is probably one period that, in one way or another, has set the destiny of almost all of us – this is the trace of the USSR. This is “the point of construction” or, more precisely, the point of development and the inner conceptual ground of the “Russians” series as a whole. A couple of years before the artist was born, a new idea was proclaimed in the report of the 24th reunion of the Communist Party: the unified Soviet nation was considered to be the result of the strong social, political and ideological unity of all classes and strata, all nations and ethnic groups that populated one-sixth of the Earth surface. The Russian language was accepted as the common language, which testified to “the part that the Russians played in the brotherhood of the nations of the USSR”.

However, it is not the Russian language that links Khoroshilova’s “Russians” together. The photographic language expresses the connection between the two tendencies, the chronicle of the artist’s meetings with his sitters and the summing up (or, rather, the synergetic union) of the signs of their common being in history and modernity.

The depth of history is different in every photo. The age of an old woman, the styles of national accessories, the surface of weather-beaten wood, the tradition of military education, the discord in clothing – all this seems to point at periods, epochs and even dates. However, nobody is confident about the certain historic being of these people – neither themselves, nor the photographer. They just live here and now, and the artist is accepted into this circle of life.

Khoroshilova’s method can be defined as communication and verification. Her talent in dealing with people gives the artist a chance to understand and become part of the life of her characters. The very process of photographing inevitably becomes their only common business: to capture and to sit to it. This very process is a continuation or a part of communication. At the same time, for the characters it is an episode, for the photographer – a work of art, while for the viewers it is a possibility to penetrate through image into the author’s view and deeper into the meaning of details and historic contexts.

The most important quality in Khoroshilova’s photos is the duration of the fixed action. It is neither a stopped second of a press report, nor an awesome presence of the eternity. The gaze and the look upon the face, details of the costume, everyday objects, elements of space and landscape are not only parts of the composition, but also layers of history.

It is really tempting to call the artist’s method a scientific one, an anthropological or a sociological one, but the distance in relations and the objectivity of the experiment – these necessary conditions – are omitted and even overcome by the author. The artist and the sitter are equal players in the “shooting area”. It is their mutual sincerity that brings harmony to the photo and creates an opportunity for a critical judgment; then, history and ethnography, understanding of religious contexts and inevitable influence of globalization, geographical and even zoological traits – all this things, changing from one photo to another, comes to form the existential historic study of Anastasia Khoroshilova.

The existential method gives the photographer a chance to “plunge deeper” and to avoid the risk of using numerous stereotypes, such as “staged” portrait photography, norms of objective art, principles of visual anthropology, and the necessary appellation to recognizable Russian images. A camel or a hunting falcon, people of different nationalities and religions are neither new images of Russia nor an alternative to bears, eagles and women in colourful shawls. The road that Khoroshilova’s pictures take, from ideas to work with the camera, choosing and printing of photos, and their presentation – all this forms a “media-complex” that can be perceived both simply (even commonly) and in a complicated manner, through the prism of Chicago school of sociology or the philosophy of post-structuralism. It seems that the “Russians” project can be described by the phrase once pronounced by Pierre Bourdieu: “An educated mind and a wild one differ much less that we can imagine”.

Georgy Nikich, art historian, curator of the project

Anastasia Khoroshilova
Russkie
Kurator: Georgy Nikich