PhotoFair San Francisco 2018

Lost Horizon (2016). The world promised by the October Revolution had to be not only fair and prosperous, but to also colonise the outer space. Socialism should have been established not only in space, but also in time, aided by technology which would allow to turn time into eternity. But over time, the economical failures had also brought disillusionment about the political utopia and about the promised bright future. In Lost Horizon, Tkachenko shot objects, which represent the image of the ideal cosmic future. He chose the format 6×6, encapsulating the utopian state projects into the Suprematist form of his fellow compatriot artist founder of the Russian Avant-Gard Kasimir Malevich’s ‘The Black Square’ from 1917, which being a revolutionary art piece, reflects the historical epoch it was conceived in.

ALMANAQUE-Fotográfica proudly presents two body of works of photography and video-art by Ricardo Nicolayevsky.  Post-produced throughout two decades, the pieces become the time-tunnel from a poetic production process transcending words. Still and moving image from a public and a private world captured 35 years ago —at a gone New York— are reborn in another time and place. Lost Photos & NYC’83 proposes a dialogue with a present that threatens freedom of speech and human rights in a new status-quo. A photography series with intimate and enigmatic images, while the NYC’83 is a video-art portrait where the public and the private realms melt on the streets of the city open to all possibilities. The Lost Photos series —experimental by nature— has been mounted in a classic style, so its narrative and poetry may mimics with abstraction and found fortune. The NYC’83 video-art portrait captures the Punk and New Wave spirit of a young Nicolayevsky recording the idyllic XX century’s Metropolis. Late in 2016, the Museum of Modern Art of New York (MoMA) acquired the Lost Portraits series, to which NYC’83 belongs, a total portrait featuring its streets, inhabit tans and the author. Time is the prime material for these productions. As Nicolayevsky remarks in one of his aphorisms: “Es imposible matar el tiempo sin herirlo” (“It is impossible to kill time without hurting it”).

ALMANAQUE-Fotográfica proudly presents two body of works of photography and video-art by Ricardo Nicolayevsky.  Post-produced throughout two decades, the pieces become the time-tunnel from a poetic production process transcending words. Still and moving image from a public and a private world captured 35 years ago —at a gone New York— are reborn in another time and place. Lost Photos & NYC’83 proposes a dialogue with a present that threatens freedom of speech and human rights in a new status-quo. A photography series with intimate and enigmatic images, while the NYC’83 is a video-art portrait where the public and the private realms melt on the streets of the city open to all possibilities. The Lost Photos series —experimental by nature— has been mounted in a classic style, so its narrative and poetry may mimics with abstraction and found fortune. The NYC’83 video-art portrait captures the Punk and New Wave spirit of a young Nicolayevsky recording the idyllic XX century’s Metropolis. Late in 2016, the Museum of Modern Art of New York (MoMA) acquired the Lost Portraits series, to which NYC’83 belongs, a total portrait featuring its streets, inhabit tans and the author. Time is the prime material for these productions. As Nicolayevsky remarks in one of his aphorisms: “Es imposible matar el tiempo sin herirlo” (“It is impossible to kill time without hurting it”).

New Era (2009-14) suggests a fiction about a world where man passes spiritually taciturn ways in which predominates despair with the desire for liberation and transcendence. The series evokes the malaise of a society in which man is constantly faced with his own evil and overcomes their fears. The images evoke the metaphor of the spiral that renews what withers and blooms again and again, before a symbolic -and distant, quasi-futurist rebirth of man.

New Era (2009-14) suggests a fiction about a world where man passes spiritually taciturn ways in which predominates despair with the desire for liberation and transcendence. The series evokes the malaise of a society in which man is constantly faced with his own evil and overcomes their fears. The images evoke the metaphor of the spiral that renews what withers and blooms again and again, before a symbolic -and distant, quasi-futurist rebirth of man.

El Cimarrón y su Fandango (2014) allegorically speaks about the Afro, Indigenous and Mulato communities in Mexico and its members’ journey through the fluctuations of colonial history, their integration into the Mexican territory, and their sense of identity. Yet that past isn’t merely a descriptive historical concept: it is, above all, a definition of the present. A present, in the case of their Afro-Mexican descendants, that remains marginal, unstable, and immemorial. This series has been largely published in global media including The New York Times, British Journal of Photography and belongs to some of the preeminent institutional collections in Mexico. Recently was shown at National Museum of Photography Centro de la Imagen, Museo Amparo and numerous museums through Asia Pacific with the support of Mexican Foreign Affairs Ministry.

El Cimarrón y su Fandango (2014), habla alegóricamente sobre el pasado de una comunidad de origen africano y el viaje de sus miembros a través de las fluctuaciones de la historia colonial, su integración en el territorio mexicano, y su sentido de identidad dentro de ella. No obstante, ese pasado no es solo la descripción de un concepto histórico; es -sobre todo- una definición de la presente. Un presente, en el caso de sus descendientes afro-mexicanos, que permanecen marginados, inestables e inmemorables para el discurso hegemónico.