Phantom

{ LTA 6 } Arsenal Gallery, Kiev (UA) / Curator: Katheryna Radchenko A white sheet of hopes and imposed persuasion of ideal existence are one of the signs of the Lost Territories, or state systems engendering simulacra of reality – phantoms. Jean Baudrillard compares the map of the territory with the territory itself – with the original. He says that the map (as a simulation) is no longer a simulation of the territory, but a synthesized model of a real without origin or reality. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. To simulate means to pretend that you have something you do not really have. The simulation calls into question the distinction between "true" and "false," between "real" and "imaginary." Thus, new content forms old systems. A path to an ideal system of existence goes through the creation of illusions on the social level or in everyday life, through belief into new images and symbols, which results, sooner or later, in the collapse of the system, the images, and the ideas. This exhibition brings together the works which reflect the idea of formation an ideal social space, casts doubt on the long-term viability of utopian systems, and visualize transformations in the former Soviet states.

Control

{ LTA 5 } Fotohof Gallery, Salzburg (A) / Curator: Sputnik Photos in collaboration with Gordon Macdonald & Paweł Szypulski Until recently, nearly 30 years after the fall of the iron curtain, history seemed to have left us for good. As a result, the Sputnik Photos photographers started to look for its remnants in the lost territories of the former Soviet empire. On the border between Europe and Asia, we were revisiting our childhood traumas of being fed by gross propaganda, believing that our own experience gave us a unique tool – the right cognitive perspective. We were the West and the East at the same time. We were you and them at the same time. To our surprise, we soon found that history started to return quickly and unnoticed. The mechanisms of authoritarian systems we remembered and were investigating in the post-soviet republics started to re-appear in our own, ‘western’ reality. The dictatorships of Central Asia or the Caucasus use the same methods of fear management and dividing society as those present in the politics of right wing parties in France or Germany, and even more so, in Poland or Hungary. The Lost Territories project was conceived as a study of the post-soviet countries 25 years after the fall of the Soviet Union. Initially, we planned to look at how the authorities of the distant republics disciplined their societies and created monuments of their own glory. Meanwhile, LTs have become a mirror of the profound changes in the modern world – it denies the concept of the ‘end of history,’ and witnesses the return of nationalisms, as well as the growingly sophisticated methods of control over societies.

The New End

{ LTA 4 } Arsenal Gallery, Bialystok (PL) / Curator: Sebastian Cichocki Extensive photographic archives, and Sputnik Photos are one of them, permit almost any kind of statement – they are easily reconfigured, reshuffled, and their meanings are adaptable. The photos selected for the New End show staged by the Arsenal Gallery have provided a basis for a narrative with an explicitly cautious, eco-political tone. The adopted futurological perspective presupposes geological time (applying to rock formation processes) and, consequently, rejects the concept of time that is measured with individual human lives. This exercise in imagination – viewing a photographic archive what it could be like in the future, in several hundred or even thousand years – turns the collection into a prophecy; it can be looked at through the prism of a slowly approaching catastrophe that will sooner or later hit the human race exploiting natural resources, damaging the environment and exterminating more and more species (including itself). This is a set of hypothetical ‘postcards’ sent to us from the era that will come after the Anthropocene, or the geological period characterized by massive expansion of Homo sapiens.

Fruit Garden

{ LTA 3 } Published by Sputnik Photos (2016) / Edited by: Rafal Milach Initially a strip-mined cross section of the consequences of anthropocentric appropriation, Fruit Garden begins to unfold as a photographic field guide of sorts, albeit one that leads the viewer less to bird than to cage; less to tree than to coil of wire painfully binding its bark; less to Arcadian landscape than to post-Soviet landfill; and less to primordial habitat than to the slabbed pavement beneath which primeval memory has been suppressed. Tweezers in hand, Fruit Garden’s archaeological dig of a survey extends to a meticulous scrutinization of the doctrinal mindset underpinning Michurin’s axiom; and of the ways in which, during the reign of the Soviet Union, its repeated and obsessive implementation on a society-wide scale left in ideology’s wake a razed expanse of human ecologies and psychologies, here represented by unseen tribes of damaged individuals, scarred for life by a regime’s dehumanizing regimen of invasive scientific experimentation, and yet doggedly clinging to some semblance of a makeshift existence going forward. But the psychic and subcutaneous wound (a deep one) continues to fester, and the branding of objectified body and degraded soul has yet to fade. Clinically detached research can indeed be unspeakably violent, and a tour of its archive a veritable horror show.

Sediment

{ LTA 2 } Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw (PL) / Curator: Paweł Szypulski The presentation in the Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw is the first of a series of exhibitions, which will be created under the project "Lost Territories." In a period of eight years (2008-2016), members of the Sputnik Photos worked in the former USSR. An archive consisting of several thousand photographs was created, entitled "Lost Territories Archive," which became the basis for exhibitions, books, and installations. Each of the emerging narratives will touch upon another important aspect of the post-Soviet area.

 

Phase Zero

{ LTA 0 } Cricoteca, Krakow (PL) / Curator: Paweł Szypulski Before setting off on their journey, the photographers struggle through a thicket of signs. They find points of reference and inspiration, as well as the clichés they will need to confront. They study documents and books, browse through iconic and utterly unknown images, and watch film classics and YouTube videos. Based on the words of others, they build a foundation for their own expression—phase zero of their own project. The installation Lost Territories on Kraków Photomonth "Phase Zero" is an attempt to capture the moment in the development of a project when everything is still fluid and possible, when new images start to form out of a cluster of overlapping meanings or interlocking and interacting quotes. It is a model of a small fraction of the complex ecosystem out of which the Lost Territories photographs have grown.