One Head and Thousand Years, 2024
Art Paper Editions 21,7 × 30 cm, 80 p, ills. b&w, paperback
ISBN 9789464775808
edition of 500
purchase book here
In 2021, after a pandemic pause, I started shooting project about changes in Uzbekistan t, but it remained unrealized - I considered it would be difficult to complete. I was tormented by migraines, which made it clear - I would not be able to finish this work. On a piece of paper, I draw circles and understand that I need abstract therapy, but certainly related to photography. This has already happened in my practice - to shoot without a clear idea, without satisfying my ego, without worrying that I don’t have enough film rolls. I take out my old digital camera, offended and abandoned by me in a plastic box, and take the first shot. My thoughts fly fast like spring birds and the desire to catch at least one of them is not crowned with success - circling overhead, they only confused.
For several months I have been using existential experience as the basis of the story - a viscous substance of memories, anxieties, something unsettling, something that I had not systematized before. Although can it be called a basis if its form is not stable? Trying to crystallize the spectrum of problems, I construct a non-linear story, centralizing my figure. Becoming behind the camera and in front of it - I am my own storyteller and story. The process is ambivalent - that which lives inside me and flows along bloody paths, tests my boundaries of external and internal. Thinking about the real existence of my family, the lost connection with my sister, who is ten seconds younger than me on earth time; I have to accept my vulnerability as a human, as photographer living in the system of the post- Soviet Muslim world. Suddenly, natural phenomena and domestic objects begin to speak with me in a new language. Clearing the layers of the mind, like a fresh onion, I get negative pleasure. It pulls me in. Penetrating deeper, like an unidentified blind creature, I try to grope for the surface, and it answers me with weak flashes, like those strangers warning about radars in front on a night road. What is inside of me is breathing and breathing is intermittent and hot. And here I am, as if I am in the core of my worthless head, which, like a top, makes mysterious circles and cannot find its place in the universe.
with the support of Polycopies & Co