Exhibition "TRANSLIT" by Nina Ay-Artyan

Starting March 17, the Gallery art gallery club will host the TRANSLIT exhibition by photographer Nina Ai-Artyan, who is widely known to the photographic community for her photo projects in street photo genres, self-portrait and genre photography. The exposition includes 30 works of different years made in Moscow. The author herself explains the idea of the name of her photo project “TRANSLIT”, as “transmitting the sensation that arises in certain situations using a camera, which is similar to transliterating the text, transmitting its meaning to someone else’s alphabet and attempting both understanding in general and understanding using those the means at our disposal. ”

Ay-Artyan does not hide his preferences in choosing locations in the city - along with crowded squares and streets, this is often transport: the Moscow metro, buses, minibuses. The situation of a person moving from point A to point B is a situation of relaxed waiting for the final goal, as opposed to the tense situation of the railway station or airport. Citizens in public transport have a special behavioral pattern similar to entering into a kind of trance: deliberately defocused looks, turned into oneself, tense, and, at the same time, relaxed poses, radiating estrangement. In the author’s photographs, in many ways, the paradox of human asociality in an ordered crowd, in a regulated anthill, is studied, an attempt to catch the deeply personal in the average mass and the associated sensations and associations.

Nina herself says that: “in my opinion, the most important thing, the most elusive and complex thing that a photograph conveys is a sensation. And we cannot experience exactly the same sensations twice, no matter how much we would like to. Because time has passed, our experience has changed, the world has changed, and no matter how we try to look at the same object with the same eyes, everything has already become different. And here, of course, it is impossible not to recall the famous saying of Heraclitus. Everything has changed: both the river and Heraclitus, and that is why "you cannot enter the same river twice."

Often, moving away from the genre photo, where the emphasis is on one thing, the photographer does not distinguish a person in an urban environment, but makes him one of the many elements that make up the city landscape. It is this feature of the photographer’s works that makes them related to the collages of Sergey Parajanov, where the lace ribbon has the same specific gravity as the portrait of the beauty.

The photographer explains this artistic technique: “I like to work with complex, rich compositions, in which, at the same time, every detail in its place and all together forms a kind of ornament, like in a kaleidoscope.”

Nina Ai-Artyan, artist-stylist by education, photographer, member of the Union of Photographers of Russia. Member of many photo exhibitions in Russia and abroad. Winner of the First Open National Photo Award “Best Photographer 2010”, Winner of the Street Photography Festival 2014. Winning the nomination “Snob” in the contest “The Best City of the Earth” announced by the Moscow City Department of Culture for the 865th anniversary of the city for the best Instagram (продукт Meta Platforms Inc., компания признана экстремистской организацией, деятельность на территории РФ запрещена) photos, a participant in a special exposure of the street photo contest in Miami (2014).