Kharkiv School of Photography: Soviet Censorship to New Aesthetics:
Part 3 - Contemporary Photographers Exhibition 2
© Elmira Sidyak
Elmira Sidyak
Elmira Sidyak (b. 1980) belongs to the new generation of Kharkiv artists that emerged in the 2000s when high-quality digital photographic process became available. Like another Kharkiv artist and her friend Oksana Kurchanova, Sidyak was inspired with art photography after she attended Roman Pyatkovka’s lectures on contemporary photography in 2011.
Elmira Sidyak’s work is always experimental.
Her Building Kit (Build a Woman) project (2012) is a series of collages in which likelihoods of female faces are “built’ out of pieces of torn photographs depicting women in their apartments and everyday surroundings.
In Regional Studies (2014) the artist uses a thread and a needle to literally sew together fragments of photographs taken in different regions of Ukraine, thus offering an artistic solution to the problem of cultural and mental discrepancies of the country’s geographic parts with differing regional political preferences.
In Alternative Standard (2015) Sidyak turns to Kharkiv School’s favorite manual coloring technique giving it a new slant. While the traditional approach was coloring a black-and-white picture, the artist uses oil paints over a color print, achieving an unusual visual effect. This project could be understood as a further development of Eugeny Pavlov and Vladimir Shaposhnikov’s painted photography collaboration projects.
View Portfolio: Regional Studies
View Portfolio: Alternative Standard
We welcome your comments. VASA Exhibitions are the result of various curators, artist, and photographers.