Attention Hub

Attention Hub
contemporary
Russian
photography
in the expanded field
Marina Istomina. Krysha
The definition of hub is not only intersection of different lines, but also a useful working node.

Attention Hub is a project-platform, presenting Russian authors, who work in a field of contemporary photography and visual art. Their practices are developed in response to a global context, and this makes them stand out of the existing traditional pattern. Many of them are already internationally known in the different contexts: from contemporary art to documentary projects. Attention Hub gathers their powerful statements together.

Our mission is to overcome boundaries related to art, and, namely, cultural perception, language and distance. Attention Hub both changes perceptual patterns and rejects isolation of any kind.

Avoiding stereotypes is our principle. Though Russian photography is often described as «local» and «exotic», we recognize the fact that contemporary artists work in an extremely complex field today, thus we avoid any generalizations and trends. Their individuality is a potential that we aim to develop and that is worth an investment.

By making this platform, we represent contemporary Russian visual art appropriately in the international arena, which means we speak about the situation as it is: difficult, but not without those who are ready to change it.

Attention Hub is a place for those, who are curious about or already involved in emerging Russian art. We believe that the audience, collectors, curators, institutions and artists should not waste their time searching, but instead have a place for interacting and developing the overall art-environment.
Making a new context
Artists
Click to the image to see artist's portfolio
Katya Yanova
Artist working with photography, small sculptural forms, video, sound and installations.
Interested in the image of the modern man who experiences emotional instability. Liminal (transitional) spaces and states between stages of human or societal development. Often uses, is inspired by and reinterprets personal stories and events. As if being an indicator, emphasizes the problems, crises of his generation.
From the project Micro-Movements
Dmitry Pechurin
In his projects, Dmitry consistently analyses the relationship between individuals and power, examining the dynamic between subjects and the institutions of the state.

His particular interest is focused on concepts such as identity and self-identification, exploring what these notions encompass.
Dmitry poses questions such as:
— What methods are used to form a community and belong to a great culture.
— How does an individual justify oneself in the conditions of constant production of sacred symbols and patriotic practices.
Beginning with a personal project centred around an environmental disaster, Dmitry progressively expands his scope to address more global issues in the interactions between the state and individuals.
From the project With love for the Motherland: methodological recommendations
Vitaly Severov
Vitaly Severov conducts long term documentary projects and with an emphasis on field work.

For his debut project Summer Shore (2016-2019) Severov traveled to old villages of the Pomors (native people of White sea) on Summer shore – a coastal area of the White sea on the Arctic of Russia. Observing the polar day and night and the disappearance of the Pomorian culture, he told the story of his family which is bound to this place. This resulted in a hand-made book, editions of which were published in fall of 2020.

In his current project "Memories of The Future" (2019- ) Severov works with post-documentary photography, touching on the relationship between human memory and the environment, rethinking the heritage of the USSR, post-colonialism, the future of nuclear waste and their related semiotics. For this project he traveled to the North-West of Russia and regions of the Caucasus and Near East. Severov works with found materials (paper, technics) from abandoned industrial and military zones, and experiments with old digital printing, creating large-scale photo installations on found materials of the USSR era.
From the project Memories of The Future
Daria Vengerskaya
My name is Daria Vengerskaya, I am an artist and I work with photography, collage, archival images and found materials.
I film 35 mm and use mixed media techniques, work with textiles and Ai. For me it is important to use different techniques, expanding the conceptual correlations of the project.
My art practice is aimed at researching modern society through the prism of social networks (and platform for the second-hand items in Russia- Avito). I observe and analyse the transformations of society associated with certain historical events and how they relate to today's events.
I study public-state relationship and how various factors, such as religion, propaganda, politics influence them.

From the project We Are Russians, with Us Is God Knows what
Kristina Sergeeva
Kristina's artistic practice revolves around exploring themes of collective and individual memory and personal perception of the contemporary Russian context. In her works, she focuses on reworking and reflecting on historical context, national identity through observation, exploring the landscape of post-Soviet spaces. In her projects, she seeks to emphasize the transition from individual experience to universal understanding, interpreting objective reality into symbolic structures. Through her works she seeks to provoke a dialog about the contemporary understanding of heritage as a phenomenon and draws attention to the influence of the past in the present; how the closed value system and ideology of the victorious country affects its image in the outside world.
Marina Istomina
Photography is the main medium through which I explore Another. In this way, I think through the image, but go beyond it. Creating my own narratives, I want to provoke the viewer, mix the cards, hypnotize, confuse stories and plots, enter the territory of emotional, personal, turn the body, change masks and play different characters — I feel this is all about artistic energy, not about photographic. Usually I start with the private stories, small details, but after a while, the plot expands, small stories are becoming large, and this is a very important transition at which stories turn out common to different people. This is the stage where the viewer connects to the story — for this I create them.
From the project Suffocation
Vladimir Seleznev
I am an artist working with photography. In my projects, I try to comprehend issues of personal and social identity, social mythology, the collective unconscious.

Overall, I am troubled by what can be encapsulated in the term "metaphysical anxiety" – a natural apprehension of irrationality and unknowability of being. This encompasses various forms of expression, including religious and national self-awareness, the desire to align with a specific social group, consumerism, aggression, ressentiment.

I am captivated by how a person, aware of their finiteness, explains the external world to themselves, and how these explanations, whether seemingly benign or overtly perverse, are legitimized, postulated, and subsequently become dogmas within different communities at different levels, from family to the state.

From the series Those who talk in the temple areconsidered to sorrow and woe
Alexander Nikolsky
I feel attracted to forms that seem simple, but hide unfolding levels of complexity. Raw, coarse, unframed physical space filled with moving and unclassified forms — those are objects and metaphors of the unconscious.

Once I started with common visual shooting, my interested started to develop into a search of relations between subjective processes and internal dynamics of space. Processes when repressed, invisible or something out of any significance suddenly ooze on surface of visible reality.

Photography is a handy and flexible material with indefinite boundaries, which is suitable at its best to talk of things that do not have any name.
From the series ex-humus
Dima Zharov
Via his personal projects Dima Zharov works with stereotypes within society and reinterpretation of body representation, particularly in social media.


From the series Stirred, not shaken (2019 - ongoing)
Varya Kozhevnikova
"My name is Varya Kozhevnikova, I'm an artist working with photography. In my work, I combine documentary and performative approaches, balancing between fact and fiction, direction and improvisation. I explore the female nature, focusing on such aspects as physicality, mental processes and their consequences, especially perfectionism, obsession and overthinking. I take my personal experience as a starting point and compare it with the collective one. That way, the photography's subject becomes an explorer's subject and an opportunity to engage with oneself through the other".
From the series 13.31
Arseniy Neskhodimov
"Since I mostly take self-portraits, the main character of my photos is myself and my experiences. The choice to photograph the same character related to the fact that it is easier for me to record changes in my life, the end of one stage and the beginning of the next. Switching from one style to another. This is a kind of diary in which I try to convey a sense of confusion and uncertainty in the modern world where everything has already happened and in my opinion it is only getting worse. In my work, I no longer asking any questions because I don't have any answers to any of them."
Self-portrait with a face slim exerciser muscle lips from the series Body care
Alexander Bondar
I work mostly with photography, printed graphics and videos. My practice is closely connected with the city as the environment for the self-representation of its inhabitants, who perform their routines and leave traces on the multi-surfaced canvas of the city. Using documentary-style photography and video I try to observe the strategies of interaction with the urban space and I use printmaking, bookmaking and video editing processes for layering and sequencing the images.





Untitled 5, 2012
Ksenia Yurkova
Ksenia Yurkova is an artist living between St.Petersburg and Helsinki. She works primarily with photography, video and text. The main focus of her interest is communication and language: the varieties of its substance, the possibility of conversion, its mythological aspect, stereotyping (the question of personal and political self-identification and identification by others), problems of memory, attitudes, and reliance.





Stuffed Rabbit, 2018
Untitled 5, 2012
Alexey Bogolepov
"I'm in the center of the photographic act from start to finish, recasting the object by spotlighting it in a new way. This means I generate the light that has not been encountered by the object before. In this case it's an assembly of flashes. Creation of new light is a routine ontological gesture, an instance of working with a material. It produces a new set up, a new configuration of
circumstances."





Rus, 2015
My artistic practice reflects my interest in analogue photography as well as collecting, preserving, and presenting archival materials. In designing my books, I try to create a tactile interaction with the subject matter of my research – thus cementing the importance of the material in art against the immateriality of digital imagery. The medium of the artist's book gives me a large degree of artistic freedom: interweaving together the imaginary, symbolic and real, I can create at this junction a new story as I see it.





Running to the Edge, 2013,
Alexander Veryovkin
Untitled. From Intervention. 2015
Olya Ivanova
I use my work to document and deconstruct nuances within Russian life. I focus on communities outside of urban centers, the work portrays the simultaneous expression of traditionalist and modern values within these communities, and the ways these values inform a larger sense of Russian identity.
Everyone goes to their roots, looking for a cultural identity. I'm interested in what this process looks like in Russia, where we have new wave of patriotism and the surge of national consciousness. I have photographed the most traditional part of Russian society — rural people celebrating Village Day. A festival of 'small homeland' and village life — a mixture of traditional ceremonies, legacy Soviet rituals and modern pop music. What do our roots look like? If I am Russian, who am I?





From Bologoe, 2013
Tatyana Palyga
Photography is my main medium. In my work I turn attention to personal things: I explore the place I work or live in, people and phenomena that surround me, my family and close relatives, as well to formal features and possibilities of photography. I'm interested in urban space both taken separately and in connection with its inhabitants, human-constructed landscape and its visual representation.

I believe that intimate and composed language of a photographic book is the best suited for my work.





Settlement, 2014
Anna Prilutckaia
Photography today is a mass communication tool, the easiness and accessibility of the image "in your pocket" reinforce the streams of camera clicks, it seems that the photography is swelling with its filling and can't stop. I see its plastic character, it's a flexible material with a non-uniform shape, although at first glance it's so easy to call its constituents: light, the way of its registration, optics. But in the theory and practice of photography there are no dividing boundaries, this absence is just a good filling, and as often happens we aren't talking about only photography.





Semi-finished product, 2018
Sofya Skidan
Sofya Skidan was born in 1996 Ukhta, Komi Republic A recent graduate of Moscow's Rodchenko School of Multimedia and Photography as well as a professional yoga instructor, the artist works with a specific selection of materials, techniques and subjects to forge a relationship between Eastern spiritual practices and modern critical theory. Tapping into the complexities of postcontemporary, Skidan raises questions around updated understandings of identity within today's technogenic culture, as well as the crisis of nature and the fast-approaching environmental tipping point in the age of the anthropocene.





Do you want to find your CHOMMAA, 2017
Denis Shulepov
I form a collection of certain things and reveal the principle of this collection in the process of its formation. The objects of the collection are made from the objects that create a certain aesthetic pleasure for the observer. The collection articulates the questions of how the notion of beauty outside artistic institutions is formed. In the course of my work, I use from my own experience, observation and desire to make something that would express the completeness of my sensation.





Objects, 2018
Andrey Bogush
Andrey Bogush (born 1987) lives and works in Helsinki and Berlin. Known for its installation, fixing digital images in their continuous transformation. Exhibited in the Tate gallery, London and the Kiasma museum, Helsinki.





Proposals, 2015
Olga Bushkova
I grew up in Rostov-on-Don. I moved to Zürich in 2011. Since then I was preoccupied with big
questions: who am I? am I a photographer? how can I convince my husband to have children? I was searching for answers by making photobooks: "A Google Wife" and "How I tried to convince my husband to have children". In the process I became a photographer and even a mother. I guess I use photography as an instrument to discover myself and coerce others.
A Google Wife, 2017
Oksana Yushko
Globally, photography has stopped changing the world. In a post-truth world you could trust and be interested only in something you know in person.
My photography is always about being in contact with people. I do not consider myself to be a portrayer of conflicts, but I work with projects that reflect the political situation of the world. My goal is to get people to listen to each other and to think about what we can do to avoid conflicts, comparing but not confronting.





Victory Day in Grozny, 2010
Mary Gelman
In personal projects, I prefer to explore topics of gender and body, boundaries, discrimination, human/environmental interactions. Mainly subjects of my story are people or community who have not voice in society, which are «invisible» or ignored by state or society. For me it's fundamental to get close to my subjects. I'm уvery open and respectful of the people I photograph. I know that every behind my story are real people, so I try to be as attentive and sensitive as possible with my subjects.

Lisa, 2017
Ksenia Sidorova
Ksenia Sidorova works with photography and other media based in Moscow, Russia. Her personal projects are mainly focused on the behavioral aspects of the human personality that exists within the framework of mass culture and social stereotypes.





Nikita Shokhov
I am excited to live today, in a rapidly changing world in which visual media play an important role. I have always been fascinated by optical image—I began my path from black and white film photography, and today I am discovering the realm of virtual reality. I am interested in such issues as mind and body, carnival culture, mixing of documentary and staging approaches, political context, religion. My goal is to work at the intersection of social studies, literature, technology, science, visuals and sound. I aspire to meet the challenges of the outside world, and to make art that creates a new visual experience for a new human.





I Hate You Too
Crimea, 2014
Asya Zhetvina
Questioning the very basic notion of photography as probably the most indisputable historical source I'm building a narrative that takes back in time. From a technical perspective, I use the
combination of written accounts, images, documents, collages and contemporary photographs printed with old printing techniques. On a conceptual level, I play with a photographic representation and manipulation of information within the images.

The memoirs of Yan Khtovich, 2017
Irina Zadorozhnaia
Irina Zadorozhnaia works with various media including simulations, installation, video and photography. Her artistic practice appeals to a possible interaction between real, virtual and hypothetical. What defines a person in the epoch of digital technologies when the latter provoke constant redetermination of a possibility and a reality. This case is not a simple dichotomy of person/machine, nature/artificial, but the search for a place where something ends and another thing begins. Detection of relations between models 'describing our feelings' and innovations.





Fantom, 2016
Carina Khorkhordina
Carina Khorkhordina is an artist and a trumpet player living in Berlin. Through her work with photography, sound, and improvisation in music and other fields she's recently been focusing on bringing together different disciplines, people and methods to create a situation of exchange, collaboration and feedback ("No one ever works alone"*).
Currently she is working with the trumpet player Axel Dörner and percussionist Burkhard Beins on a series of photographs and recordings at particular locations in Berlin, as well as playing concerts in various settings, especially concentrating on the work with Eric Bauer, a musician from Berlin who plays electronics.
Given free will but with certain limitations, 2017
* No one ever works alone is a title of Sonore (Peter Brötzmann, Mats Gustafsson, Ken Vandermark) album recorded in 2003, the title is taken from Kenneth Patchen poem.





Lyudmila Kalinichenko
At the moment I am at the state of intuitive search. My place in art can be described as a space for research in such areas as: communication in modern communities through the "copy & paste" effect, image performativity, transformation and transition of form, post-internet possibilities, combining the new and traditional for the formation of universal symbols".

Zhenya Zhulanova
Salehard, 2015
Ivan Petrokovich
All of human communication methods are inherently flawed, so all of our attempts to
understand each other, even those who are closest to us, are doomed to be merely interpretations passing through hundreds of filters. While the world around us becomes increasingly more complex with frightening speed, instability of our perceived «reality» becomes impossible to ignore and the very notion of «understanding» grows elusive.

The ambivalence, the ambiguity of message that was once considered a prerogative of poetry has now became an essential part of any public expression, and photographic medium is no different - from irrefutable document it transformed into a vast field with unclear boundaries, teeming with possible meanings.





Case Study, 2015
Julia Abzaltdinova
Works with the theme of national identity representation; fixes traces of human influence on the natural landscape.

Julia Abzaltdinova was born in Yekaterinburg in 1984. Currently lives in Moscow. In 2011 entered the Rodchenko Moscow School of Photography and Multimedia, Valery Nistratov's workshop «Documentary Photography». In 2014 had graduated. In 2014 studied
FotoDepartament.institute class «Photography. Post graduate», led by Nadya Sheremetova. Now works in Moscow, Sochi and the Urals.
Africans in Russia, 2018
Egor Tsvetkov
Born in 1994 in St. Petersburg, Russia. In 2018 graduated from Rodchenko Art School (Moscow).
Artist, documentary artist, works with photography, video and objects. He is interested in the influence of new technologies on the representation and memory of a human and his self-presentation, the effect of digitalization on local territories.
From series оInsecure Digital Private Collectionп, 2016
Fyodor Telkov
When I was a child, I often traveled to the old past in my dreams, to those days, that are gone for good, thus impossible to experience. All that was left was to imagine. As a photographer, I became interested in looking for peculiar wormholes, the parallel worlds, societies, where time and history seemed to be frozen. From this point of view, I explore local territories and find it exciting when the past, fairy tales or myths suddenly come up through the surface of well-known reality.

Tales, 2013-2018
Jana Romanova
Jana Romanova's personal projects are mainly focused on topics of collective identity and hesitations that arise between a desire to keep individuality and be accepted by society. She works with her subjects as collaborators using different methods of participatory art, and challenges herself with mind experiments, where she adopts various ideologies to question her own identity and explore different roles photography plays today.
Waiting, 2009 - 2015
Alexander Sedelnikov
The photographic image for me is composed of multiple weighty components. All the points of "media esoterics" that pervade the space of photos with invisible information, and also translate the image into the discourse of perception, are now less important than the very act of image reproduction. I mean neural and physical complexes, the properties of the brain and body, that affect the creation of the object. Personal has gone deep into the material, teaching me to give up boring, stimulate and excite
the objective. As a result, the substance is preserved - the phenomenon of the "visible", the hologram of the present or the generation bit in the field of my study.
Strange Love, 2018
Natalya Reznik
Natalya Reznik was born in Perm (Russia) in 1981. On some of her projects (Virtual Acquaintances, A Stolen Archive of Otto Steiner) she reflects political and social issues of Soviet and Post-soviet Russia (emigration, problems of elderly people, politics of Russia in the Soviet time). Natalya's projects such as "Looking for my father" are more focused on her private family issues. In 2014 Natalya published her first photo book "Secrets" reflecting her own experience of emigration from Russia to Germany. One can describe the style of the project as a "magical realism". Her second photo book based on the project "Looking for my father" was published in 2016 and consists of the mix of real photographs from the album of her mother and collages made by Natalya herself. Her photo book "Hope" about her grandmother is coming soon.

Hope, 2018
Evgeniy Molodtsov
The main question that I raise in my projects - how through the study of identity, its re-/deconstruction and appropriation, to come to self-identification and understanding of how the identity is transformed in the new modern "network" society of "tourists", in which a person begins to experience significant difficulties in determining its connection to a specific geographical place.

Vepsian Forest, 2015
Danila Tkachenko
I am an artist who works with documentary photography. Countries in Central Asia and Eastern Europe serve as the basis for my works.
I am primarily interested in different social Utopia, I am fascinated by the medium of photography as a tool that can be used to identify and overcome social trauma.
I believe photography to be the most appropriate medium for my work. I am attracted by the opportunity that this tool affords me to focus on both conceptual and visual aspects. In addition, photography enables me to apply other art practices, such as land art, installation and action art.





#4. From the series Motherland, 2016
Petr Antonov
Petr Antonov is a photographer and visual artist working in Moscow, Russia. In his work he uses photography to explore visible traces of history and culture, as well as possibilities of photography as an artistic tool. Petr Antonov's works have been exhibited in Russia and internationally. Petr Antonov has been nominated for the Prix Pictet (2010), Paul Huf (2012) and PDN30 (2012) awards, his series 'Ruins' was shortlisted for the 2016 edition of the Sony World Photography Award. In 2018 Petr Antonov co-curated group photography show titled New Landscape focusing on the new post-Soviet landscape, and new Russian photography that explores it.
Historical buildings, three kinds of stairs, trees, figures of people, lighting tower (also includes ice cream and souvenir stalls, assorted barriers, utility machinery, flower beds, lawn), 2010-2013
Elena Chernyshova
Elena Chernyshova is a Russian documentary photographer.
A self-taught photographer, she developed a passion for this visual language during her studies in the architectural academy.
Photography for her is a way to investigate the daily life of different groups and communities in the context of environmental, political, and economic changes. Her work aims to visualize the
impact of certain conditions of human activity, ways of adaptation, and diversity of lifestyles.





Tayga, 2016
Igor Samolet
Nature of the human relationship is in its amplitude, from dramatics to comedy it attracts me and becomes a basic impulse of a picture creation. Professional soviet and post-soviet photography has always been afraid to approach and glance at a universe of private/family/intimate. This is consequences of a tough regulation of the private life of soviet citizens (even within the family) and of a photography usage as principal means of propaganda at the dawn of communism. Nothing personal, everything for the big Idea. This seems not obvious, but really modern Russia in its majority thinks by the collective mind, public, but not an individual happiness of the exact person. This particularly feels both in a social. and in a politic field. That is why when I refer to the "personal" topics, I hope that in the country of big projects, happiness of a little person takes its place. In the future. For sure.





Carrot King, 2015
Irina Yulieva
Broken Knees by Irina Yulieva documents the performance of maturing. The characters' movements are spontaneous, wild, and seemingly not connected to each other. A viewer sees in the photographs the broken (or is it cracking?) body language of kids, teenagers, middle-aged and elderly people. Maturing turns out to be a transitional state that may never end.
Broken knees I
Andrey Ivanov
Photography is like a way.
Curiously, where it will lead.
How deep is the rabbit hole?





"True Stories #2" (A Book About My Family), 2016-2017
Born in 1986 in the Perm region. Graduated from the Faculty of Mathematics and Mechanics of UrFU with a degree in applied mathematics. Works as a photographer.





Go there... (2014-2017)
Dmitry Lookianov
Dmitry Lookianov was born in Krasnodar, Russia, in 1983. Since 2000 he lives in Moscow.
In 2015 he graduated from Moscow Rodchenko school of photography and multimedia. Now Dmitry mainly works with photography.

Instant Tomorrow
Maria Morina
Time is what I mostly think when I'm making pictures. Have I spent enough time
thinking over what I'm going to film? do I understand the situation correct? Are
pictures enough for what I'm working on? Do I need other media? Do I need
more time?
A mentally ill girl in her room, which she
shares with three other people, at a
refugee center, Grozny, Chechnya, 2009
Evgeniya Sterlyagova
Photography for me is one of the ways to understand, rethink, and create myths. Weaving my mythology I feel the need to tell more personal, to use modern approaches in photography. It is important for me - to use my own personal emotional experience. I would like to get an emotional response to my work. In addition to photography, I do video art. I'm willing to experiment and seek to use imagination to create a special visual space.
Iron man, 2017
Yury Gudkov
In one of the interviews, B. Groys compared the contemporary artist to «a performer in a circus who travels around and shows one the trick everywhere».

«And if he jumps through a flaming hoop or rides a panther, it has nothing to do neither meaningfully nor thematically, nor ideologically with the city or an event where he jumps or rides».

I think that my aim as one who deeply connected to Art is to reconcile meaning for the hoop, the panther, the city, the event and, perhaps, the artist.
Keep an Eye on What You See, 2015
Ivan Pushkin
Ivan Pushkin (b. 1988) is Russian visual artist working at the intersection of photography, digital art and media installations. He graduated from Maxim Gorky Literature Institute and the School of Photography of Elena Sukhoveeva and Victor Khmel and studied a course New Art Strategies of the Institute of Contemporary Art (Moscow). His works had been exhibited at personal and group exhibitions, art performances and international festivals in Russia, USA, UK, Canada, Brazil, Germany, Austria.
Sacred IV, Pedestrian crossroad on Pobeda st., Klin, 2017
Maria Kokunova
In her works Maria Kokunova focuses on the process of self-reflection and searches for visual metaphors to be used for examining her life in order to translate the emotional and psychological state into some visual form. Instead of forcing herself into a formal framework, she uses various visual modes and employs a greater variety of photographic techniques and styles to create a complete visual image.





Untitled from FACE III, 2017
Anastasia Tsayder
Anastasia Tsayder was born in 1983 in St. Petersburg and is currently based in Moscow, Russia.
Anastasia graduated from the Faculty of Photojournalism of St Petersburg Journalists Union. Her commissioned work has appeared in Bloomberg Businessweek, Bloomberg Markets, Forbes (Russia), Port, Die Zeit, De Volkskrant, Washington Post, D - la Republica, Itineraries of Taste, RBC, Bolshoi Gorod, Afisha, etc.

Sacred IV,
Pedestrian crossroad on Pobeda st., Klin, 2017
Moscow Summer Olympic Games, 2013
Anastasia Tailakova
Using rare, nearly forgotten cameras to achieve a subtle feel of the very recent past, Anastasia Tailakova makes images that look like recovered memory recordings and induce a strong sense of nostalgia. While being modern creations, these pictures appear fragmentary and taken out of their native sequence, which is likely located somewhere at the advent of digital technology. They seek to join the rows of anonymous visual artifacts that have long lost all links to their factual origins. The photographer's calculated approach to working with aged tools tempts us to suspend our disbelief and discover something old in something new.
Not Appllicable, 2013-2015
Irina Ivannikova
I was thinking about the relationship between photography and performance and arrived to the idea that the definition of performative photography is more interesting to reveal through the absence of action and body of an artist or a model on the photography. In this case, we come very close to the line where the photography almost ceases to be performative. But reveals the ability of photography to capture the mental constructs of subjective states. And the smallest details pointing to the phenomenological cast of subjective states and bodily experiences, extend the hang of the photography at the invisible feature of performativity.





Renovation, 2017
Alexander Anufriev
Alexander Anufriev works on a projects describing and analysing social landscape of contemporary Russia. His images are grotesque, speculative and full of farce. But this is his own "propaganda", based on three pillars: criticism, absurdity and props. And resulting sharp images are always somewhere between document and metaphor, demonstrating and revealing symptoms of time.




Russia Close Up
Julia Borissova
The focus of my attention lies on artistic research, routine processes, new ways of representation. The topics I'm interested in relate to border issues, communication/interaction in the digital age, gesture in the social space. Every casual activity can be the object of research, but in the case of the artistic process, the most important thing for me is the unpredictability/paradoxicit
of the final result.





Anastasia Khoroshilova
Born in Moscow in 1978. Lives and works in Berlin and Moscow. Studies of photography and
history of photography at the University of Duisburg – Essen (Folkwang University of the
Arts). Her works were shown in many solo and group shows including 54 Biennale di
Venezia (2011) or Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris(2014). 2010 – Allen-
Auerbach Grant from "Akademie der Künste, Berlin. From 2012-2017 teaching „Project
Photography" at Rodchenko Art School Moscow. Since 2016 member of Deutsche
Fotografische Akademie (German Photography Academy).
Russkie, 2007
Attention Hub basically
Why we decided to create Attention Hub?
Values
What is Attention Hub?
Attention Hub is a project-platform, that unites contemporary artists from Russia, whose practices lie in the fields of photography and visual art. Their work is developed in response of a global context, which makes them stand out of the existing traditional pattern.
Meeting point
Attention hub is a meeting point for contemporary Russian photography and those who are interested in getting to know it. By visiting the platform, purchasing a print, you start a dialogue with Russian photography and support the artists' growth on the international market. The intersection of Russian and international fields is what we form.
The goal
Artists need mobility: their work should appear on international events. Unfortunately, an independent artist with a solid project is not necessarily the one who can afford a trip, an exhibition or any other form of project's implementation. In Attention Hub we collect a budget in order to make future events possible. In addition to names' presentation, the platform sets out direction for Russian artists' united movement on the international stage.
Artists' statement matters
Attention Hub unites conceptually strong artists and sets up market mechanisms, links and media attention that, in turn, form a statement: сontemporary Russian photography is in demand.
Why?
Financial support
Looking for funding can be challenging for young artists, and interest in contemporary art in Russia is local and volatile. Attention Hub intervents in the issue of global relations.
Stereotypes
The way international audience perceives Russian photography is often based on "exoticism", that builds a pernicious stereotyping around Russian art. We show the artists, who speak intercultural and international language, pushing imaginary boundaries.
Isolation
There is a vacuum situation in terms of knowing what is happening with Russian photography and art in general coming from the international environment. The isolation resulting from the "local" and "exotic" tags interferes with the artists, who, supported by institutions and collections, could perform on the world art-scene. Attention Hub adjusts the exchange/integration mechanisms, and becomes a point of attention and a knot of interests for both artists and audience.
Why online?
Online is a dynamic and accessible format, providing the maximum audience coverage from anywhere in the world. Attention Hub is an introduction to the context of Russian photography as well as an interaction. The combination of technology, digitalization of information consumption and trends of selling art online all build new ways of overcoming physical boundaries and setting up a convenient and focused support, that independent art needs.
Implementation
Relevance to the global discourse
We've gathered contemporary artists who have an independent view, work with current realities, have a market potential and are ready to take a confident position in the art field. New Russian photography is interdiscursive: it is not tied to the legacy of the past and exists regardless of territorial boundaries. Emerging Russian authors do not speak about Russia and the post-Soviet space exclusively, but are engaged in a dialogue with the global trends.
Know Russian photography personally
Attention Hub is a common voice and personal acquaintance with contemporary Russian photography. The platform offers a convenient way to find, to meet, to compare artists; to establish useful contacts. The platform accumulates the voices of the generation; the people, who comment on the current situation. We present each name separately, properly showing their strongly implemented projects.
What next?
Attention Hub is a multiphase project. Firstly, it is an indefinitely developing platform; a dynamic and constantly updated database of emerging Russian names, performing in the field of photography and contemporary art.
Events-interventions are the large support of this extended process. The first phase of Attention Hub will last from September 1 to November 30, 2018 and will aim at promoting authors and raising funds for the presentation of their work at international events 2019-2020.
Why do we sell the prints?
Regarding photography, print is the visualization of an author's concept. It is also a product, that, in the market relations, gives an author a resource for development.
Half of the budget received from selling the artist prints on Attention Hub will go to the authors; the second half the institution-organizer will use as a budget for event program and international initiatives in the near future.
PROJECT LAUNCHED BY FOTODEPARTAMENT
Contacts:
info@fotodepartament.ru
+7 901 301 79 94