Kharkiv School of Photography: Soviet Censorship to New Aesthetics:
Part 3 - Contemporary Photographers Exhibition 2
© Oksana Kurchanova
Oksana Kurchanova
Oksana Kurchanova (b. 1976) belongs to the new generation of Kharkiv artists that emerged in the 2000s when high-quality digital photographic process became available. Her engagement in art photography started in 2010 after she attended Roman Pyatkovka’s lectures on contemporary photography, and since 2012 she has been actively exhibiting her work in Ukraine. She also employs photography in her contemporary art projects.
Sisters (2011), Kurchanova’s first attempt at art photography, illustrates a more traditional bkack-and-white image idiom picturing differences in a teenage’s and a kid’s behaviors in front of a camera.
Kurchanova’s Boudoir series (2012) was shot on a smartphone camera using the hipstomatic application which is responsible for the blurred images and brutal and toxic colors. This deliberate downgrade in quality emphasizes the irony of the series’ title and is reminiscent of Boris Mikhailov’s concept of “bad photography” for imperfect reality.
The 2013 Кolezhanki (Colleagues) is a series of digital collages combining black-and-white photos with digital coloring and added textures. It is this complicated technique that transforms images telling a story of three young concubines into glossy magazine pages, visualizing them where they would like to belong.
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