"Tartaria. New topography." Sergey Poteryaev Automatic translate

With the support of the President of the Republic of Tatarstan, the New Tartaria Foundation and the Pushkin Museum of the Republic of Tatarstan, on March 5, 2020, at 18.00, the Gallery of Modern Art of the State Museum of Fine Arts of the Republic of Tatarstan (Kazan, 57 Karl Marx St.) will open an exhibition of the winner of prestigious contests, photographer Sergey Poteryaev.

The image of the mythological country of Tartaria, which is a geographic term used in medieval Western European cartography in relation to vast areas to the east, became the basis for a new project of the famous Yekaterinburg photographer Sergei Poteryaev “Tartaria. New topography. " The symbol of a huge country clearly shows a situation where Tatars living in different parts of Russia, despite the spatio-temporal differences, feel themselves to be part of a single ethnic group.

At the exhibition of Tatars of the Murmansk, Astrakhan, Irkutsk and Sverdlovsk regions - the heroes of photographic stories of Sergei Poteryaev. Like a cartographer who painted distant lands, he also looks at his heroes from outside and discovers the complexity of their ethnic identity.

Today the Tatars live on the edge of the northern seas, in the Volga delta, in large cities of the industrial Urals, in the taiga villages of Eastern Siberia. Their stories of relations with their native land, the traditions of their people, their family unfold in a world that erases ethnic differences in clothes, things, and interiors. Photographic language also rather emphasizes the universal aspects of life in different regions of Russia. Emotional, recording the external appearance - topographic - images are associated with the language of photography that took shape by the 1970s. Instead of romanticizing frames of unique events we see typological series: portraits of wrestlers, portraits of families in home interiors, portraits of women in Tatar costumes. But the movement around the exhibition, based on visual and semantic rhymes of different photo stories, is not a linear narrative with a clearly defined ending. A photograph captures external structures, but the identity of a territory or person develops like a story - and the observer’s impassivity may encounter the thrilling materiality of the lace fabric, and the desire for cultural universality with the desire for tradition.

The curator of the exhibition is the deputy head of the Republican Agency for Press and Mass Communications "Tatmedia" Khairullin Eduard Faridovich.

The exhibition runs until April 19, 2020.

About the author of the project

Sergey Poteryaev was born in 1988 in Yekaterinburg. In 2010 he graduated from the Ural Federal University. the first President of Russia B.N. Yeltsin, specializing in "Energy". Since 2009, engaged in photography. Fellow of the Government of the Russian Federation for young cultural and art workers in 2017. The artistic practice of Poteryaev is diverse and includes different methods of working with photographic images: in some cases, the author seeks laconic documentation of the modern political process, in others, the historical investigation or rethinking of problematic issues of world culture is at the center of his interest.

Among his personal exhibitions:

• Line of the North (Yekaterinburg Museum of Fine Arts, 2015),
• “[Post] Industrial Ural” (“Gate” art platform, Kaliningrad, 2015 and the Metenkov House Photographic Museum, Yekaterinburg, 2017)
• The Old Duck (UnderdogGallery!, Hamburg, 2016 and The Window Gallery, Chelyabinsk, 2017)
• “Insight” (Alte Feuerwache Loschwitz e. V., Dreseden, 2016 and d | d contemporary art gallery, Dusseldorf, 2017)

Among the groups: Pingyao International Photographic Festival (Pingyao, China, 2013), Russian Film and Video Art (The AVA Gallery, Cape Town, 2015), Anti-Museum (Electromuseum, Moscow, 2016), the first Triennial of Russian Contemporary Art (Museum Contemporary Art “Garage”, Moscow 2017), 4th Ural Industrial Biennale of Contemporary Art (Yekaterinburg, 2017).

Participant of art residences in Warsaw (2014), Dresden (2016), Klaipeda (2017), Kaliningrad (2018), Yekaterinburg (2020).

Curator of the House of New Culture (Pervouralsk, 2013), the Cultural Transit Foundation (Yekaterinburg, 2014–2016), and the photographic museum “Metenkov’s House” (Yekaterinburg, 2015-2017).

Laureate of the competition “Young Photographers of Russia” (2009), Cortona On The Move OFF Circuit prize (Cortona, Italy, 2013), Wortimbild International photocompetition (Klangefurt, Austria, 2016), etc.