Gorky House, 5.19pm 2004 by Melanie Manchot. C-type photograph. © The artist.
Helen Barrett went to the Photographers' Gallery to hear tales of Russia old and new...
German-born photographer and artist Melanie Manchot produces work that encourages us to view personal experience as political.
In her latest installations, on show at the Photographers’ Gallery until February 27 2005, she turns her attention to ordinary people living and working in modern Moscow. They reveal themselves to be confident, optimistic citizens struggling to make sense of a turbulent past.
Manege Square, 3.15pm 2004 by Melanie Manchot. C-type photograph. © The artist.
For Groups and Locations, Manchot selects 12 historic sites in and around Moscow, inviting passers-by to freeze, face the camera and become part of a deadpan stage-managed group portrait.
Those set outdoors sometimes reveal a picture-postcard city drenched in sunlight and saturated colour, its inhabitants arranged in groups of twos or threes. Cool youth, gawky children, fur-clad elderly women and relaxed middle-aged couples are choreographed in settings like a pedestrianised space in front of the Aeroflot headquarters or a brutalist concrete building within the Park of Economic Achievements.
Through Manchot’s lens, the city’s citizens look like living monuments.
Aerflot, 12.36pm 2004 by Melanie Manchot. C-type photograph. © The artist.
In the video work Hotel Moscow, a group of Muscovites re-tell their versions of one of the city’s most notorious landmarks. Commissioned by Stalin in the 1930s, and with a bizarre façade made up of two contrasting architectural schemes, the hotel accommodated visiting dignitaries close to Red Square.
The story of Hotel Moscow centres on Stalin’s failure to recognise that he was presented with a choice of two different architectural plans, both of which he signed, leaving his staff fearful of pointing out his mistake, and with no option other than to construct the hotel using elements from both designs.
Metro, 10.43pm 2004 by Melanie Manchot. C-type photograph. © The artist.
Those interviewed for the piece are from diverse backgrounds and age groups. How each recalls the story of Stalin’s blunder reveals much about how we blur fact with fiction to create history.
At the end of the loop, the interviewees’ voices merge to a cacophony of conflicting accounts of the story. The hotel’s uncomfortable history and jumbled asymmetric design becomes a metaphor for what starts to sound like a state of national confusion, before falling silent.
Cathedral of Christ Saint Saviour, 6.23pm 2004 by Melanie Manchot. C-type photograph. © The artist.
Even today, in Putin’s Russia, photographing (and being photographed in) certain public spaces is subject to heavy restriction or even prohibited. A current preliminary bill proposes the curtailment of protests and demonstrations near public sites of political importance.
For modern Moscow’s blend of democracy mixed with curtailment, Manchot’s installations gain contemporary political charge, as well as a preoccupation with history.
