The Ural is a land where the industrial era has left a deep imprint. Once filled with the roar of factories, the rise of smokestacks, and the growth of workers’ settlements that expanded with the pace of production, today the region stands on the threshold of a post-industrial future. Some of the old industrial giants have fallen silent, while new ideas and values are emerging in their place. Born not from machines, but from people searching for their place in a changing world.

In this project, Sergey Poteryaev investigates the transformation of space and the global shifts affecting the region: cultural changes, environmental issues, and the search for personal narratives within the vanishing past. The parentheses in the exhibition’s title emphasize the unfinished nature of this transition, pointing to the dynamics of change and the challenges the Urals face in their quest for a new identity in the contemporary world. Poteryaev’s photographs serve both as a chronicle and as a journey — where progress gives way to personal reflection, and the landscape becomes a space for dialogue between past and future. In this context, the Urals cease to be merely an industrial region; the area becomes a laboratory for experimentation.

Sergey Poteryaev is a multidisciplinary artist and curator from Yekaterinburg, whose main focus is photography. His artistic practice explores the landscape within a broad sociocultural context and examines photographic media as tools of both expression and manipulation. In his projects, he studies the mutable nature of visual language, combining documentary and artistic approaches and integrating different media.

The exhibition is presented as part of the joint project “Contemporary Russian Photography” by ROSPHOTO and A–Ya Society, which introduces audiences to the work of talented contemporary artists and photographers from across Russia. A selection of works from the exhibition will become part of the ROSPHOTO collection.