'DISSOCIATIVE IDENTITY DISORDER'

Olga Kroytor belongs to a new generation of artists, and this, as a rule, means that attention to such art is relatively linked with the concept of the future. Therefore her exhibition comprises of dozens of collages, where dynamic graphic lines adjoin with photographic newspaper cuttings from the 70s and 80s.

The grainy photographs contain many attributes of late soviet reality, though they do not directly adhere to the imagery and instruments of ideological propaganda. However, for this reason exactly, on a stage scale a simple sheet of paper unfolds all the historical conflict of a utopian view of life – it’s content, a multi-faceted journey of utopian forms.

The geometry of the collages is unavoidably in the spirit of Soviet avant-garde, all aspects of which have derived directly from the future. The construction of its philosophy and art was dictated by utopia, which would embody itself through revolutionary reproduction in the creation of new avant-garde forms. The ensuing subsequent 70’s compromised of no less grand counterpoints to this ambitious project, when the non-incarnated idea of paradoxical means rooted itself in the Soviet civilization. The shortage of perfection of its materiality filled cavities with infinitely postponed potential. Utopia changed the original nature, losing the precise time-spatial form and obtaining instead shrill content. Such connections of two figurative systems caused a productive and delicate conflict. The avant-garde lines converted into schematic ones, indicating the implicit, invisible, but nevertheless the culmination of documented, nostalgic, uniform everyday life.

As said in the broadest reflection of the photographic era: “Life is short, and art is long // and in this struggle life prevails”. These words, as with the photomontages, are importantly taken out of context. But not in order to show their concealed meaning, instead to show the interior reason of their appearance.

Maxim Kryekotnev