Jedrzej Franek
Note from the Editor, The Calvert Journal:
On February 25, 2022, The Calvert Journal ceased publication until further notice. At a time when Russian acts of war are being committed in Ukraine, we cannot in good conscience continue our work covering culture and the arts like business as usual. We are against this war in Ukraine and call for its end.
Our website will remain online, with our archive material still accessible to whoever would like to read it. In the meantime, we will be taking a break to rethink what the mission and purpose of The Calvert Journal could be in a changed Europe.
I am very proud of the work my colleagues and I have done over the past several years to illuminate the life and culture of a generation of young people across Europe, including those in Russia, where many of those we have written about now stand in utter dismay at the actions of their government. I would also like to thank you, our readers, for your interest, loyalty and enthusiasm for the work we do. I hope that in the future we’ll be writing for you again.
This war must end.
–Nadia Beard, Editor-in-Chief of The Calvert Journal
Post-Soviet Visions: Image and Identity in the New Eastern Europe is a group show of photography exploring new visual representations of lifestyle and landscape in Eastern Europe. The exhibition gathers the work of a young generation of artists rising to prominence a quarter century after the end of Communism.
The photographers in Post-Soviet Visions come from Georgia, Germany, Latvia, Poland, Russia, Ukraine and Uzbekistan. Although the personal circumstances of the photographers born in Eastern Europe differ, they share a common past with either they, or their parents, growing up in countries that once existed under Communist rule. Today, they live within the globally connected modern world where borders of East and West are erased by new technologies. But the physical traces of the past can be seen in work such as Jedrzej Franek’s dizzying shots of Polish tower blocks and Michal Korta’s striking black and white images of Brutalist buildings in Skopje, Macedonia.
Paulina Korobkiewicz
Patrick Bienert / Max von Gumppenberg
Dima Komarov
Masha Demianova
Following the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991 and the end of its influence over its satellite states, the countries of the former Eastern Bloc have each forged their own paths. In artworks such as Hassan Kurbanbaev’s portraits of teenagers in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, and David Meskhi’s photos of skater kids in Georgia, Post-Soviet Visions captures the new identities emerging across the region. Instead of old binaries of East vs West, socialist vs capitalist, their images capture a generation shaped by issues that are personal rather than the political; by questions of sexuality, gender and style.
Grigor Devejiev
Genia Volkov
Paulina Korobkiewicz
Hassan Kurbanbaev
David Meskhi
Photographers: Armen Parsadanov, David Meskhi, Dima Komarov, Genia Volkov, Grigor Devejiev, Hassan Kurbanbaev, Ieva Raudsepa, Jędrzej Franek, Masha Demianova, Michal Korta, Patrick Bienert and Max von Gumppenberg, Paulina Korobkiewicz, Pavel Milyakov.
Post-Soviet Visions: Image and Identity in the New Eastern Europe
Curated by Ekow Eshun and Anastasiia Fedorova
Calvert 22
