The pro­ject in­cludes the ex­hi­bi­tion Pho­toarche­ol­ogy by Dmitry Vilen­sky and a col­lec­tive dis­play of works by Lyud­mila Fe­dorenko and Igor Vasiliev.

From the early 1970s one could no­tice the in­creas­ing num­ber of Eu­ro­pean artists de­vel­op­ing the sub­ject of mem­ory. That trend reached its peak dur­ing the pe­riod of search for self-iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of the East­ern Bloc coun­tries and the col­lapse of the So­viet Union. At that time two main ap­proaches to the study­ing of the sub­ject of mem­ory were in­tro­duced: on the one hand, the artists tried to con­sider and per­ceive the his­tory and the past within the frames of col­lec­tive mem­ory, and on the other hand, they lived through the feel­ing of per­sonal loss of the re­cent pass. Some of the young Leningrad-based pho­tog­ra­phers made those ap­proaches their own.

In the 1980s and 1990s Leningrad saw ir­re­versible changes that fol­lowed its trans­for­ma­tion to Saint Pe­ters­burg. All of a sud­den, things that seemed to be un­shak­able were gone for­ever. Be­cause of those changes many artists felt the need in reval­u­a­tion of ex­ist­ing val­ues in all spheres of life and art, in­clud­ing pho­tog­ra­phy. At that time the artists who strived to ex­tend the bound­aries of the pho­tog­ra­phy’s lan­guage and cul­tural value began to ap­pear in the pho­to­graphic so­ci­ety; new forms of vi­su­al­ity were ac­tively searched for. Among the pho­tog­ra­phers who man­aged to make a sort of time mould of the pass­ing away epoch was Dmitry Vilen­sky. Deal­ing with dif­fer­ent types of pho­to­graphic archives pho­toarche­ol­ogy ap­peals to mem­ory which does its best to recre­ate the pic­ture of the for­ever gone time from the shat­ters of re­al­ity. The sen­sa­tion of the age is stressed by cer­tain ad­di­tional image pro­cess­ing tech­niques. “For me these meth­ods in­clude the trans­for­ma­tion of color range or its com­plete re­moval, al­ter­ations in the image’s sharp­ness and struc­ture, in var­i­ous de­fects of the emul­sion coat­ing, and the marks left by chem­i­cal so­lu­tions,” says Dmitry Vilen­sky.

The “pho­toarche­ol­ogy” move­ment was founded by Dmitry Vilen­sky in the mid 1980s. From 1988 to 1994 Vilen­sky held a num­ber of solo ex­hi­bi­tions which suc­ces­sively de­vel­oped the con­cep­tion of “pho­tog­ra­phy as an arche­ol­ogy of mes­sages to one­self.” It was the dis­play Pho­toarche­ol­ogy which took place in New York in 1992 that later gave name to the move­ment.