KRISTINA PODOBED

She started her photographic journey in 2011, mainly documenting herself and her female friends.

Even if your stance on bodies, nakedness and sexuality in photography is free-spirited enough, Kristina’s Podobed photography are there to catch you off-guard, to push you to the boundaries where intimacy and vulgarity suddenly merge to create a rough and honest image. It is the photographers walking that fine line who end up challenging society’s moral status quo – and it’s those photographers that we need the most today.

In 2015 and 2016 Kristina studied at International Summer School of Photography in Latvia (Jim Goldberg and Anouk Kruithof workshops )

Currently Kristina lives and works in Brest, France

A disturbing strangeness of being.

OLENA KLOCHKO

Olena Klochko (Oleklo) was born in Bakhmut, Donetsk region . She took a degree in languages and worked as a translator for some time. She was doing drawing and painting, based on her own self-taught methods.

Her first official solo show took place in Kursk in 1994 . In 1996 Lena moves to Saint Petersburg, the cultural capital of the post-soviet period and along with the city enjoys a short period of freedom and hope.

The she was working as a fashion designer, studing at Stieglitz Academy of Art and Design , later she graduated from High School of Directors and Screenwriters in Moscow.

An artist and a film director, Olena established herself on the late 90s - early 2000s St Petersburg art scene as a fashion designer, performer and painter. She worked mainly with textiles, launching her projects Spring on the Runway (collection of dresses-paintings), Eva Braun (a multi genre event combining fashion and feminist performance) named cult in media, Naked Lunch (textile pictures exhibition and performance), Paleolithic (collection of costumes-sculptures combined with performance).

These projects were received with enthusiasm in the art circles, gained critical acclaim and were highly popular among the public.

Later Olena was working in the film industry, released several documentaries and made on youth drama that was not released due to crusual changes that started in Russia since 2013.

In 2015, deeply moved by the events of the 2014 Russian- Ukrainian war in her native area, Olena moved back to Ukraine. Here she conceived a pivotal multimedia project “Beautiesandbeast” (2017-2019), which consists of the series of paintings and performance-based movie(44’).

She continued making art and took an active position on the fast-evolving Ukrainian art scene, exhibiting in Kiyiv and other cities in Ukraine and abroad. In 2021 Olena became the curator of the Thin Red Line art project, which aimed to investigate and promote contemporary art of the Eastern Ukraine and to establish the Art School of the Eastern region of Ukraine.

The main topic of Olena Klochko's work is human portraiture. Her portraits deal with psychological implications of existence in a body, the material appearance of a human being in this world.

In summer 2022 Olena left Bakhmut, in autumn her studio and house were destroyed by shellings, she was lucky with the support of her friends to evacuate her art-studio and Thin Red Line art-project to Berlin, where she now lives, trying to find a new ground under her feet and goes on making her art.

The time of wandering .

Between the death and daze. Our roof and bed is not existing any more, the walls of our houses are defragmented into bricks and sand, our old fotos, fotos of our children when they were small as well as of our ancestors are set on fire, our old girl- friends are found dead in their houses in the morning after the heavy shelling of the total city, which had happened before they came into our street to show they are already present here, running and commenting for their youtube channel with the strong ural accent, through the ruined school number 5, by the dead bodies of our soldiers left on the march asphalt… or maybe one of them was an officer… His body was so young and beautiful even dead, thanks god, his face was turned and I couldn’t recognize someone, who I knew… This video, sent me by sister, rushed me into the anger of the degree, that stops mind and blood in veins and takes one completely out of bliss, pushes in the darkness… I couldn’t love the world several days, just hate I felt, it was so that you cannot breath or eat, just some paranoia or the loss of trust… but then, to the people who love I surrendered and the picture of the world restored … Acquiring my abilities to think and create back, I recognized my oneness in the city , that became my friend immediately as I put my feet out of the mini bus, that brought me and my art works here from Ukraine almost a year ago…

Part of these pictures ( “Beautiesandbeast” series, “To the North through the North-West”) I made in Bakhmut yet. But there also pictures made here in Berlin. I was thinking of how to reflect to the war , while working at the public presence (as a resident of the Spring in Pankow fest) I made one as a child’s view (“City and it’s people demolition” ) and the other which I called “Nobody” as it was the time of hard acсeptance of the loss of self-identity in the new place..

“Beautiesandbeast”- is the series of expressionist paintings on paper that was created in Bakhmut in 2017-2020. It is always the women standing with the cleaning spray or razor (one of the means to control her world), standing ready to fight some medieval monster, that can be partly seen or not seen at all as a part of the composition. The models-sellers from the market, cleaning women, cooks etc. were also the participants of the performance and the movie made by Olena Klochko (camera Roman Potapenko) as her contribution to the war stopping processes in her region during the first “soft “ part of Russian aggression against Ukraine.

“ North through the North-West” was created in summer 2021 during the residency of the artists of the East of Ukraine, organized and curated by Olena in Bakhmut and shown at the new born collective(the Contemporary Art school of the East of Ukraine) group expo “Thin Red Line”. This picture is an allusion on the famous cinema masterpiece by Alfred Hitchock with the meaning that would be reformed by the events that started in February 2022. The history of the creation of this picture was very happy- it was a lesson of film-shooting for one of Lena’s Bakhmut models of 17 years, who was contemplating of entering Film Academy , made in one of the artist’s favourite places, where the ground is almost red with clay -the field with the track, once built for the “Formula-1” near Bakhmut.