Фотографії з мого альбому. Придністров'я, 1973/Photos from my album. Transnistria, 1973

Фотографії, стоп-кадри з телефільму "Дністровські мелодії", 1973
/photographs, featuring stills from the 1973 film “Dniestr Melodies”
_2014


Stills from the TV movie “Dniestr Melodies” (1973) are used in order to produce photographs. Film “Dniestr Melodies” was timed to the 50th anniversary of the Moldavian USSR. After watching this film where you hear songs of love full of warm feelings to the land, see lightened by the sun people who enjoy life, – it’s hard to believe that all that are propaganda. This TV movie was filmed in 1973, during the Brezhnev tough fight against dissent, and the rise of the dissident movement. He considered himself the right to interfere in the Eastern Bloc countries, allowing himself even military intervention (in Czechoslovakia in 1968), because he believed that “no one socialist country should ever be given the benefit of the West”. But movie is telling us about the friendship between the “fraternal” republics, shows us a happy community of peoples.
In the “Photos from my album. Transnistria, 1973″ I endow pictures of the propagandistic film status of photographs, turn them into reality, thus leaving hope for their truthfulness. As if the images are not staged, but only fixing the immediate happiness of some people and stored in one of the many private albums.

Work made for Imaginary Archive of Gregory Sholette 


from the exhibition
History about some history
curated by Jaroslav Futymskyi
Labyrinth Gallery in Lublin, Poland, 2017