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The designer Gosha Rubchinskiy, a hoodie-wearing

Muscovite still in his early thirties, has been fashion’s

big story for half a decade, closely followed by his

Georgian buddy Demna Gvasalia, the design brains

behind Vetements and Balenciaga. Rubchinskiy earned

that attention with a celebration of Moscow streetstyle,

all buzz cuts, scowls and knock-off sportswear (Adidas’

current good fortunes certainly owe something to

his reimagined ‘gopniks’). But he started out as a

photographer and still takes pictures, producing photo

books to accompany his collections; and you could

argue that Rubchinskiy is as much a multimedia

creative riffing on post-Soviet style as he is a designer.

‘Post-Soviet Visions: Image and Identity in the

New Eastern Europe’, a new exhibition at the Calvert 22

Foundation’s gallery space in East London, takes in the

work of other young photographers across the former

Soviet Union and its satellite states. And in much of

their work you can see the same ambiguous,

impressionistic take on post-Soviet possibility.

The foundation, which also runs online magazine

The Calvert Journal, is dedicated to looking at

contemporary culture and creativity in what it calls

the ‘New East’. And the exhibition, says Calvert 22’s

creative director Ekow Eshun, comes out of that

conversation. What is marked in pretty much all

the works is not nihilism and despair, but rather

improvised opportunity. ‘The show is about how

these artists imagine and create space,’ Eshun says.

For curator Anastasiia Fedorova, ‘it’s also about youth,

and youth in historical context, how the 26 years

since the collapse of the USSR is a whole life for the

new generation. Just like youth, this historical

transition is also about growing pains, empathy and

ecstasy, and the restless identity search.’

It is also a show that takes you a long way from

Moscow and St Petersburg, across the vast stretch of

what Fedorova calls a ‘collapsed utopia’. David Meskhi

shoots the skate kids of Georgia, and Hassan

Kurbanbaev the teenagers of Tashkent, Uzbekistan.

Michal Korta works with the brutalist architecture of

Skopje, Macedonia, and Jędrzej Franek the pop-colour

post-Soviet pimping of Poland’s tower blocks.

For Fedorova, the show also goes beyond the easy

shorthand of post-Soviet cool, what she calls a

‘constructed fiction’. ‘We wanted to explore the new

Photographers appearing

in the Calvert 22 Foundation’s

exhibition in London include

Ieva Raudsepa (above left

and opposite, bottom),

Jędrzej Franek (above right),

David Meskhi (opposite,

top left) and Dima Komarov

(opposite, top right)

AFTER GLOW

A new exhibition of post-Soviet photography brings light where there was darkness

WRITER: NICK COMPTON

Art