new wave

Igor Starkov & Daria Andreeva

September 28 — October 16, 2012
Triumph gallery

Igor Starkov and Daria Andreeva, without leaving their city, and sometimes even the district, plunged into the world of the "new wave" for a month and a half to conduct an ethnographic study of the new cultural stratum that has appeared and gained a foothold in Russia over the past few years and consists of immigrants from Central Asia and Transcaucasia or simply immigrants.

IGOR STARKOV

"I am a wave, a new wave, the whole country will be under me," huge pipes of some factory could be seen behind the profile of the Uzbek driver,
and a still warm sheep carcass lay in the trunk. "Wait, I'll flood your cities forever," came from the speaker, as the Uzbek drove along the MKAD
and stubbornly ignored the 50 degrees in the cabin and the stink of millions
of cars rushing through the open windows of the old nine. The "new wave" came in the well-fed noughties and has already changed everything forever. She has power, there are no semitones, and she is homogeneous
in her concepts, this is clear to every "native" who at least sometimes goes down to the subway. The "indigenous" can relate in different ways,
but they definitely understand that everything has changed."

Signs of this new culture can be seen in markets, train stations, in illegal cafes with grammatical errors on signs, in dirty dormitories from the time of developed socialism scattered across the expanses of our country. More recently, the famous Cherkizovsky market was moved to the Southeast and now this district may soon turn into a ghetto like Chinatown in New York. This project will tell you about the changes that we can observe in real time, here and now.

The territory of the former Cherkizovsky market. Moscow
2012
Photography, manual printing
90 × 80 cm

Signs of this new culture can be seen in markets, train stations, in illegal cafes with grammatical errors on signs, in dirty dormitories from the time of developed socialism scattered across the expanses of our country. More recently, the famous Cherkizovsky market was moved to the Southeast and now this district may soon turn into a ghetto like Chinatown in New York. This project will tell you about the changes that we can observe in real time, here and now.

The exhibition recreates individual fragments from the life of the "new wave" and is divided into 12 thematic blocks – each includes photographs, collages, videos, as well as objects. A tabletop with a glued tablecloth, an Uzbek cup, a spice set, a bread box and an old mobile phone in an Azerbaijani restaurant. A video in which a sheep and its skull with golden teeth are butchered. An advertisement for shoe repairs and children's shoes decorated with rhinestones in the colors of the Russian flag. The faces of mannequins in headscarves, tinted with markers and a traditional flatbread with the inscription "Moscow 865" sculpted. All these artifacts are partly real and partly complemented by something that is not in real life, but may well appear.