Sergey Sapozhnikov

DANCE. FROM A POINT OF VIEW / XL Gallery, Moscow, October-November 2015

Sergey Sapozhnikov is most known for his colour photographs, in which the image is turned and the colours are altered to such an extent, that they start to resemble abstractions. The only testimony of the production, or the performance, is the outline of human figures. Much is different in Dance. Colour film photography is replaced by black-and-white and digital. The distance from the subject grows: the construction of chaos is overt, along with the creative process.

Dance is not only an artistic project, but is also simultaneously a reportage, documentation; a point of view on all that came before, a changed perspective, a different angle, in which past projects and life artifacts not only appear clearer, but, most importantly, in a new light. The author asserts that his photographs are also functional; they serve as sketches for the project, in which the subculture is to be united with “high art”
Vladimir Levashov

RESTLESS STILLNESS

Sergey’s photographs actually seem to be based on a structural principle of instability. His favorite subject is the human figure as it interacts with space, trying to adapt to multiple environments. He makes his sets obtained by assembling materials of different kind, the subject moves, mostly alone and isolated. Sometimes there is more than one character on the scene, but there is no interaction between them: each figure is lost in its own actions or postures, each of which is portrayed as part of the series. Often poses are unnatural, complicated, full of dynamism and elastic energy. The final image is a tangle of almost unrecognizable forms, of elements that blend one into another, in a constant interchange of representation and abstraction, dynamism and inertia.

The space of action is built by accumulation and layering: whether they are exteriors or interiors, all spaces look like waste dumps, formless masses of debris, shreds of deteriorating architectures, natural environments that have been corrupted by the neglect of humans or are aggressively reclaiming spaces that were once inhabited.
Irene Calderoni

THE WAY OF ENTHUSIASTS

August 29 – November 25, 2012 Casa dei Tre Oci, Venice

Sergey Sapozhnikov is a photographer who has worked a great deal, experimenting with filming artificial structures integrated into the half-natural, half-urban environment of the city outskirts. The chaos of his installations is a reference to the potential of liberation from the structure of organized space and codified behavior.

Venice gave him the idea of floating architecture, a house on the water with colorful inflatable mattresses. Sapozhnikov has selected the trees and bushes of the Venetian Hotel to build a new installation that better shows the possibilities of inflated mattresses and represent them extensionally and three-dimensionally. The artist has used such objects for a year, experimenting with their plastic and constructive capability.

Leaves and tops of trees supported by props recollect a drowned city. In a fictional construction site under the water, Sapozhnikov depicts all the attempts and mistakes involved in building a perfect stable structure. The artist inverts the physical elements of the world and builds an air- supported structure.

The installation was conceived as temporary architecture to be seen for a limited period of time from the balcony of Casa dei Tre Oci, and at the same time, as the subject of the several photographs that are now shown in the exhibition. The distance between different views creates a spectrum of interpretations of the act of looking and of his representation via different media.
Katerina Chuchalina & Silvia Franceschini

TIRELLI

Rome, 2012

My passion for photography has always been associated with the movie. In 2012, Francesco Bonami invited me to work with a collection of Tirelli costumes (Tirelli theater and lm atelier) for Tar magazine. Fortunately, for the first time in my life I had the opportunity to work with costumes of my favorite movies. Basically, I decided on Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice and have added materials from other films.

THE MUSEUM THAT LIVED TWICE

The Museum That Lived Twice (referencing the Italian title of the movie Vertigo), could be the subtitle of the project, which explores the incredible collection of this place, founded in 1881, partly destroyed in 1943, and finally rebuilt from 1946 to 1951. In this double life of the museum, Sapozhnikov introduces his own third life, a story in which he plays a revolutionary Russian constructivist architect, in the scenario of Italy invaded by the Russians (which is not far from reality). He occupies the museum and builds inside it the skeleton of what could be described as a DIY Tatlin Tower. But the invasion does not stop here. Our hero, a photographer and an architect, falls in love with the place he has conquered, and starts to document it with his camera. In a sort of esthetic “Stockholm syndrome”, the invader is conquered by what he has invaded. However, while he is dragged, or better, swallowed into the collection and archives of the museum, he realizes that his utopia cannot possibly transform the place and make it his own. On the contrary, it is the place that starts to contaminate his utopia, turning it into nostalgia for the former life of the museum, before the bombs destroyed it. But the actual epiphany of Sapozhnikov as an architect happens in front of Botticelli’s Deposition, painted at the end of the 15th century. Looking at this image, the artist sees again the compositions he made with coloured plastic and air mattresses – his cheap, but exciting modernity. This parallel is not meant to desecrate a masterpiece, on the contrary, it is the product of a reflection on form. Sapozhnikov sees Botticelli’s gures as volumesand forms that have lost their humanity, while his plastic heaps seem to acquire an almost human appearance. In the project, whose actual nameis Total Picture, we witness a transfer process between the Russian artist and the identity of the museum. Sapozhnikov tends to transpose patterns of feelings, emotions and thoughts associated with the places that define his own identity into his new relationship with the place, with which hisinitial, subversive gesture tends to overlap. This process of overlapping and interweaving between the photographer’s gesture and the museum reaches a climax with the ancient monumental staircase of the museum. Here, the spiraling of the staircase becomes one with the spiraling of the Tatlin Tower. The result is a double-helix structure: the new, unexpected, and improbable DNA of a contemporary Baroque style.
Francesco Bonami

SOFT MACHINES

The city of Rostov-on-Don is a recurring yet mysterious presence in the images of Sergey Sapozhnikov. The artist’s hometown is represented through its absence, evoked by a suburban landscape that has no coordinates and no identity, just another no-man’s-land, a rural space that has turned into a dump for building waste. In a process that apparently inverts this mechanism, the artist picks up these relics and turns them into a performative grammar, a generative process whereby the recombination of ingredients produces ever new configurations, a landscape that takes shape before our very eyes, an unsteady yet powerful architecture, full of vital force. The Gorky Drama Theater is a symbolical building in the city of Rostov- on-Don, an iconic object in the urban landscape. Its unusual shape, inspired by a mechanical imagery, is highly representative of a historical period in which the most advanced research was invested with the task of aesthetically expressing the project of the emerging Soviet society. However, as often happens, history had other plans in store for this building, which in 1943 was razed to the ground by retreating Nazi troops. In the 1960s it was rebuilt, its rooms resized and the entire plan redesigned. The passing of time and events have modeled what is a powerful generator of images, which has existed not so much in the particularity of these historical moments, but in the owing of one into the other, in a constant ambiguity of form and meaning that always leaves it open to new readings. I believe that what seduced the artist is precisely this ever-changing identity of the Gorky Theater, which inspired him to develop a multifaceted project, beginning with the building’s current appearance and the events related to it, to develop a sophisticated narrative, a dramaturgy capable of evoking the spirit of this space and its poetics, as a place of representation that is itself, simultaneously, a mirror of utopias, dreams, failures, and rebirths.
Irene Calderoni