Kharkiv School of Photography: Soviet Censorship to New Aesthetics:
Part 3 - Contemporary Photographers Exhibition 2
The SHILO Group
The SHILO Group
The SHILO Group was formed in 2010. Now it consists of three artists: Sergei Lebedinsky, Vlad Krasnoshchok and Vadin Trikoz.
In their 2010 Vagnerian Pictorialism the SHILO Group redefined the Kharkiv School black-and-white documentary discourse using Lith printing technique (For more information on the Lith techique: http://unblinkingeye.com/Articles/Lith/lith.html). The high-contrast images that ignored shades of grey and finer details looked ominously dramatic.
The SHILO Group has a reputation of les enfants terribles of the Kharkiv photography community. In 2013 the artists produced The Finished Dissertation project, where they forcefully placed themselves into the Kharkiv Photography School in a symbolic art gesture of pasting their prints over Boris Mikailov’s photos in his Unfinished Dissertation photobook leaving Mikhailov’s text comments intact. (See essay: Pavlova T. The ‘Shilo’ Group)
The Lith printing technique was also used in Sergei Lebedinsky’s 2012 The Arabat Spit (another gesture towards Boris Mikhailov with his Salt Lakes series), and the group’s 2014 Euromaidan and 2015 Anti-Terrorist Operation projects.
The 2014 Ukrainian Insurgent Army is dedicated to the history of a nationalist partisan army that engaged in a series of conflicts during World War II and afterwards in the Ukrainian territory. Collaborators and war criminals for some and heroes for others, the UIA is a highly controversial and much debated issue in Ukraine. The Shilo Group’s project is an effort to “de-demonize” the UAI in a series of staged images showing the insurgents in burlesque settings including the Red Square in Moscow.
Negatives Preserved (2011) is Vlad Krasnoshchok’s solo project that took the manual coloring technique to the new heights. Vintage photos, cabinet and visit portraits, found at a flea market, were hand-colored by Krasnoshchok to start looking like a dadaist experiment, or a child’s drawing exercise. In this work Krasnoshchok evidently looked back at Mikhailov’s Luriki (Exhibition 1) and took into account Pyatkovka’s Fantoms of the 1930’s (Exhibition 2), rendering the approach null and void in an overt artistic gesture. This is how the artist describes his work: “I started to buy these photos in a daring attempt to save them. Many of them had an inscription 'Negatives preserved' or 'Negatives preserved for further orders' on the back. But collecting somebody else’s photos just for the purpose of keeping them seemed pointless. I decided to give them a new life, a new beginning… a life they never had. In keeping with the motto “Negatives preserved”, I scanned the photos in order to preserve the original image and then began altering the prints in an attempt to revive them. I colored them, erased the emulsion and applied drawings as a way to enter into their subconscious, to reach into their soul and to give them a new life.” The project raised a heated discussion in the photography community because of its alleged ‘vandalism’.
View Portfolio: Negatives Perserved
View Portfolio: Finished Dissertation
View Portfolio: Ukrainian Insurgent Army
We welcome your comments. VASA Exhibitions are the result of various curators, artist, and photographers.