AMBIENCE XVII

Arsen Savadov

1962, Kiev, USSR, now Ukraine, lives in Kiev, Ukraine

Deep Insiders, 1997

photographs

Critics usually connect the work of renowned Ukrainian artist Arsen Savadov to the “new wave,” a movement also known as the Ukrainian “trans-avantgarde.” Savadov can justifiably be described as one of the leaders of this movement, which emerged in the 1980s, although he himself tries to avoid “aesthetic labels.” If one were to speak about Savadov’s work with a measure of philosophical abstraction, several fundamental features of his methodology can be discerned. The first involves isolating an object from its general context and reworking it. In addition, Savadov finds meanings that are important for his works in literature and history and reinterprets the experiences of past epochs.

Savadov had the idea for the Deepinsider project in New York, where he worked for a time as a loader and tried to learn English. In this way, Savadov attempted to overcome his own snobbish attitude toward the world by consciously immersing himself in the reality of ordinary people. With this series, he intentionally creates a social and aesthetic dissonance, bringing together the “elite” pursuit of ballet with the hard labor of the miner. There is, however, another important way of perceiving and reading this work. During the Soviet era, the work of the miner was in a sense poeticized by ideology and became a kind of mainstream pop phenomenon, although admittedly only within that closed social reality. Ballet, meanwhile, was assigned the status of the highest form of culture—it was also included in the propaganda machine at the elite level. Savadov himself defines the way he stages his photographs as a Dadaist practice.