Alexander Kargaltsev “Disassembled”
Fridman Gallery
This event has ended.
Art meets politics in the photography exhibit by Alexander Kargaltsev
A Russian-born photographer Alexander Kargaltsev brings a collection of works in the photographic technique of his own invention in DISASSEMBLED, his third one-man exhibition in New York City. The portfolio of over 50 unique prints, showing male and female nudes, was prepared through a meticulous process of manually removing and resetting the Polaroid emulsion on a new background. The exhibition will open on Sunday, October 22 at the Fridman Gallery (287 Spring Street, New York, NY 10013) where the works will remain on view thru October 25. A reception on October 22 (5:00-8.00 pm) will include an artist’s talk at 5:00pm, moderated by Hunter O’Hanian, a critic, curator, and the former director of Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art. Admission is free. For more information, visit http://www.kargaltsev.com/.
The works featured in DISASSEMBLED have a feel of the art prints rather than photographs. The reclining poses of the naked models recall the Old Masters’ drawings. The nudes are shown from multiple viewpoints, their bodies no longer a sum of their parts. The artist uses this treatment as a metaphor for the dismemberment and defenseless of the human dignity and spirit in Putin’s Russia. The artist embarked on this project in reaction to recent mass murders of gays in Chechnya, as well as to the troubling odds of Trump’s election in 2016 and Putin’s shoe-in reelection in 2018. As part of DISASSEMBLED, he created a website tracking the chances of Putin’s electoral victory based on data tabulated by the British bookmakers. (https://bookie-bonus-code.co.uk/russian-presidential-election-2018-putins-chances-based-odds/)
For Kargaltsev, the impunity with which gay-bashing persists in Russia and many other parts of the world makes his personal voice of resistance ever more urgent. “I always respond with my art, with my photography, with my projects, so I keep fighting,” he said in a recent interview. The artist’s critically acclaimed first solo exhibition in New York, ASYLUM (2012), portrayed his fellow Russian-born gay asylum seekers who had fled the increasingly harsh persecution at home. Photographed on New York City rooftops, against the background of the city’s historical and architectural landmarks, their naked bodies underscored the feeling of freedom and safety they found here. Kargaltsev’s new body of work, DISASSEMBLED, reacts to the deteriorating state of human rights in Russia and the U.S., with an approach that is both disturbing in its urgency and poetic in its intimacy.
A short film about the making of the exhibition: https://vimeo.com/232755391
Alexander Kargaltsev is a Russian-born, Brooklyn-based artist, writer, photographer, actor, and film director who emigrated to the United States in 2010 and was granted an asylum on the ground of the LGBT persecution he was experiencing in his native country. His award-winning short films, The Cell (2010) and The Well (2009), were made during his time at the All-Russian State University of Cinematography, the alma mater of many greats of the Russian cinema, including Sergei Eisenstein. Since relocating to New York City, he focused on photography and political activism, confronting in his art and writings the growing anti-gay policy of the Vladimir Putin’s Russia. His 2012 book ASYLUM, published as a companion piece to his first one-man exhibit in NYC, documents the rebirth of young Russians who have found political refuge in the U.S.
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Schedule
from October 22, 2017 to October 25, 2017