Moscow Girls, 2004
Photography, Nine C-type prints, from medium format colour negative. Nine sound recorded stories
Moscow Girls examines the relationship between documentation and narrative through a set of portrait photographs of nine young women and their sound recorded stories.
Images and sound are presented independently with the connection between stories and portraits deliberately left open. These young women have lived through the turn in Russian history in the early nineties, the demise of the country’s ideology, when they were teenagers. In many cases, their personal lives were vulnerable and their identities in turmoil when their country went through fundamental cultural, political and economic shifts. As a result, these young women were challenged to construct not only a new personal sense of self but to do so when their entire country and culture reconfigured too. Their lives and their stories have been shaped by ruptures, forms of violence, chaos and transformation - and they have been marked deeply by the history they lived through.
Through the formal strategies of the work, the project proposes an examination of the space between the documentary and the fictional, the observed and the constructed. The nine stories can be found in the text section of this website under Texts by the artist: “Moscow Girls, Nine Stories”