"Photology of Being" by Evgeny Balashov

The project "Photology of Being" in the Gallery of Modern Art of the Pushkin Museum of the Republic of Tatarstan was named after the book of the same name by the Kazan philosopher Vladimir Yurinov, which appeared as a result of cooperation with the photographer Evgeny Balashov.

The exhibition will feature photographs of artists, photographers, actors, journalists and others who began their career at the end of the last century, such as Ilgizar Khasanov, Victor Timofeev, Gennady Arkhireev, Alexander Artamonov, Farit Gubaev, Evgeny Kanaev, Ramil Gali, Olga Yukhnovskaya and others. In addition, self-portraits of Evgeny Balashov and genre photographs will be exhibited. Most of the works are textbooks, representing a vivid, memorable image of the artistic bohemia of Kazan. At the exhibition it will be possible to see not only photographs, but also video performances and paintings of the 90s, as well as an archive of the artistic life of those years.

The first exhibition of E. Balashov, a graduate of the Kazan Medical Institute, took place in 1989. From the late 1990–2000s. He was the curator and coordinator of the conceptual exhibitions of the postmodernist style, uniting various types of arts (photography, painting, sculpture, cinema and philosophical "ideological" subtext). Since 1997, a creative partnership begins with the philosopher V. Yurinov, together with whom in 1997 a project was developed under the name “Photology of Being”. The general idea of the project: comprehension through the graphic series of fundamental shifts of human life at the turn of the 20th – 21st centuries. The artistic method is staged photography, the photographic work is a “portrait-face” (of a person, of an object). The pathos of the work lies in the revival of the classical traditions of Russian black and white photography and the polemic with VisAgro (visual aggression in modern Western photoculture). From the model, E. Balashov “sculpted” the desired image. And a lot of things depended on the model, how flexible she was to the photographer’s desire to change her own image, not without reason were people who were well-known, most often belonged to creative professions, by their nature artistically gifted and close in spirit.

The project "Photology of Being" is a kind of archiving of the art scene of the 1990s. Evgeny Balashov became the artistic archivist of the creative environment of the last decade of the twentieth century in Kazan, as well as the “last of the Magikans” of analog photography. Now that almost thirty years have been separating us from that time, you can look with the look of an outside observer at the peculiarities of the development of art in our city. Recall exhibitions, museums and galleries, cinema, photography, theater, newspapers and magazines. Where is it all now? The works of Yevgeny Balashov “revive” many fragments of that life that is now gone. Today we have not yet written an alternative history of Kazan culture, which would be included in textbooks and books. Our exhibition will allow you to begin compiling the art archive and its development already for new generations of viewers, to carry out a museumification of what happened, to make a part of history, to remember everything and save a photo, painting, video, archival documents.

Dina Akhmetova, art critic