Pavel Otdelnov

The core of the project is the story of the artist’s family, where several generations worked for chemical industries in the city of Dzerzhinsk, Nizhny Novgorod Region. For that reason the exhibitions White Sea. Black Hole, shown in NCCA Arsenal (Nizhny Novgorod, 2016) and Chemical Plant, FUTURO Gallery (also Nizhny Novgorod, 2018), were both tailored to the local context and appealed to an aware and engaged audience. Indeed, the environmental disaster in the area of both legal and illegal chemical waste disposals is waiting to happen. The exhibitions visitors reacted as something happening literally in their back yard rather than somewhere far away. For that reason Pavel staged in NCCC Arsenal a sort of local history museum with documents and displays benefiting from the features of exhibitional space. The painting went into the shadows and gave way to history, turning from a protagonist into a witness. Such artistic “testimony” about environmental problems provoked most acute reaction of the audience.

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Over time, the project grew into a work interesting and recognizable without any geographical correlation. The artist’s perspective has gained objectivity and we can witness not a single tragic story, but an image of our common past— an epoch of huge secret industries that involved, directly or indirectly, a major part of the European population in the mid-20th century. This epoch left us with industrial areas of astonishing magnitude which proved to be feasible only under planned economy, and undergoing surprisingly rapid decay. Even faster than it takes to rot away the paper of old newspapers. Some “objects” in the painting series in Ruins were still operating enterprises in the 2000s.

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In the last few years there has been a growing interest to recent history in our society and among artists, who are able to feel and to reconceptualize this trend. There is renewed interest to stories narrated by living contemporaries, to history of own families affected by calamities of social cataclysms, to momentous historical events as experienced by an average person. Nobody is surprised by documentary theater anymore. Projects related to “micro history” such as Life Stories that publishes remaining diaries and letters of ordinary people who lived in the last century, are gaining popularity. Trivial events, attributes of simple and unsophisticated existence now serve as instruments to understand disasters of the turbulent 20th century.

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Reflecting on the reasons why people turn to this side of the past, I realized what abyss lies between myself and workers whose newspaper photos have been reproduced by Pavel Otdelnov in his installation called Wall of Fame, a similar to the distance with the builders of ancient Pyramids. This abyss is the irrevocably ended epoch. And even the part of my own life that overlaps with those times now also seems inaccessibly remote. It was not the failure of ideologies or the collapse of the empire which divided us. The development of information technology played a more important role. With the huge flow of verbal and visual information constantly consumed by an average representative of our civilization, it has become obvious that the world has split into digital and non-digital, the latter being unstable and vanishing. Moreover, emergence of global information networks, which has opened immediate access to enormous volumes of information and launched digitalization of archives with provision of free access to them, has proved to the society that history can be easily falsified and mythologized in the absence of alternative independent sources of information. This is the main reason, I think, why the society is so seeking to preserve records of the recent past, persistently trying to retain its visual imagery and tangible evidences. It is still possible to touch it and obtain eye witness testimony in various forms of recollections and accounts—from the official version of the events to stories and anecdotes provided by direct participants. 

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The project Promzona is based on the same principles. The exposition introduces a museum narrative and is divided into sections covering different sources of information related to the object. The section named Traces encompasses canvases painted from newspaper photos and ready-made objects—fragments of instructional filmstrips on civil defense found by the artist in abandoned industrial premises.

The artwork 12.02.60 stands out in this “archival” series.