Perhaps this is one of the first gestures that are taught in childhood. «Petya, wave your uncle good bye.» And the kid raises his hand over his head.

An atrophied attempt to grab, hold and not let go of the elusive object of farewell.

You can say, for example, «Sovoke in us is eternal» or, on the contrary, «we have already said goodbye to the Soviet era» or, for example, «the war has never ended.» You can endlessly analyze history or just live, experience and move to a new stage.  I get stuck in the Soviet past, because, probably, my childhood fell on its sunset, which left very vivid memories, that you can only get in childhood.

Jubilant crowds at demonstrations, pioneer lines, noisy family feasts.

People from the past are not at all the same as from the present. I find in old photographs, some fleeting flashes, particles of these childhood memories, whether they are idols of a bygone era or nameless oilmen.

To stop an instant or to release it?

Smiling faces, people waving his or saying goodbye. Sometimes unexpectedly freezing in statics with «seg heil» and causing a feeling of some kind of danger. The totalitarian spirit of the of communism’s ghost imperceptibly, but subtly poisons everything around it. This feeling disappears, I remember, a little later, when there was some clarity that everything is a lie and there is a difference between what we were told in school, saw on TV and what was really happening.

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2017. Fine Art, Moscow. Russia.