POP-SOVIET (2018-2021)
Being born in a post-Soviet country inevitably means growing up in the long shadow of the USSR – a state that proclaimed equality while simultaneously imposing strict ideological and cultural control over its republics. Daily life was shaped by a carefully constructed visual order: sanctioned images, censored narratives, and a homogeneous aesthetic that sought to suppress national identities and the diversity of local traditions. Within this system, private family photographs often became some of the few surviving traces of everyday reality, preserved quietly behind the façade of the “Soviet utopia.”
In this project, I revisit those archival images from my own family history and reimagine them through an intentionally anachronistic intervention: I recolor the photographs in the visual language of American pop-art comics.
In this project, I revisit those archival images from my own family history and reimagine them through an intentionally anachronistic intervention: I recolor the photographs in the visual language of American pop-art comics.
By inserting the bold, commercialized aesthetics, I create a speculative scenario in which cultural exchange is not blocked by Cold War isolation. What if Western mass-culture aesthetics had seeped into the USSR in the late 1940s, long before political borders hardened and propaganda machinery intensified?
The collision between Soviet domestic scenes and the vivid, hyper-stylized comic-book palette destabilizes the familiar. Ordinary situations acquire a new intensity, with color functioning almost as a metaphysical force that disrupts the ideological rigidity of the original images. Through this juxtaposition, the work reflects on the mechanisms of cultural repression, the fragility of private memory, and the alternatives that were never allowed to unfold.
The collision between Soviet domestic scenes and the vivid, hyper-stylized comic-book palette destabilizes the familiar. Ordinary situations acquire a new intensity, with color functioning almost as a metaphysical force that disrupts the ideological rigidity of the original images. Through this juxtaposition, the work reflects on the mechanisms of cultural repression, the fragility of private memory, and the alternatives that were never allowed to unfold.
