Russia in focus for new art exhibition

SUNDERLAND UNIVERSITY GRADUATE STAGES DISPLAY AT NGCA

A new exhibition charting 20 years of life in Russia will open at Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art next month.

For decades photographer John Peter Askew has travelled to the easternmost city in Europe, Perm, in Russia, which has resulted in the exhibition We, Photographs from Russia 1996 –2017, which is based on the lives of a single family, the Chulakovs.

John’s poetic and playful photographs are a kind of album for the extended family stretching from the Atlantic to the Urals.

It’s also an extended portrait of the post-Soviet world, seen through its many transitions across a quarter of a century.

John began to take photographs when studying at the University of Sunderland.

Since graduating, he has shown in many of the most important galleries and festivals across Europe including at the Arles photography festival, the Prague Biennale, The Photographers’ Gallery, London, and the National Museum of Photography. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, he began to focus on the state of Europe and began travelling the breadth of the whole continent.

Across the 1990s, 2000s and 2010s, he has photographed how Western and Eastern sides of Europe have changed – or not – to see not what divides us, but what unites us.

In the 1990s he found something special in the far reaches of regional Russia.

He began to photograph life at the exact opposite end of our continent – in the very easternmost city in Europe – Perm, in Russia.

The city is some 1,000 kilometres east of Moscow, well outside the centre of power.

Despite a lack of wealth in the transition to capitalism after 1991, the artist says people seemed to possess a very real sense of freedom, and of community.

His sitters show a true sense of togetherness – hence the title – as well as of playfulness.

They have a rare generosity of spirit.

He aims to show that these distant people are not ‘like’ us – they ‘are’ us, part of a bigger ‘we’ than most of us think about.

This exhibition brings together a full 20 years of photographs.