As part of a current exhibition on women artists, the Salt Lake City Arts Centre has included some fascinating images from The Crown, a recent series of photographic works by The Fourth Height. This project was made in collaboration with the established Swiss photographer Urs Bigler and is his first working experience with an art group from Russia.
The Fourth Height (FH) is a group of three Russian artists, Dina Kim, Katya Kameneva and Gala Smirnskaya, founded in 1992 and whose work is part of the conceptualist movement in Moscow. I understand that these artists live and work in different countries and co-operate only occasionally. Their best-known series are The Deed, The Taste of Victory and Gene Pool, manyl of which are displayed in museums and galleries in Russia and in private collections abroad.
The FH artists have a great name for their work, which they call “multicultural trash-dreaming” as it reflects mass culture through irony and fantasy. They aim to address post-Cold War and feminist issues through the aesthetics of fashion and the iconography of sex and femininity.
The Crown is a mythical project of love and heroism between three main characters Russia, Europe and Asia-Panda. The starting point seems to me to be the way in which idealised women have often represented countries - think, for example, of Marianne in France, but FH obviously pick up on and reinterpret the heroism often associated with these female icons. I have not been able to ascertain whether the artists of FH are themselves the characters in the images.
It seems that the images are firmly based on Russian and western folklore, in which the battle between Good and Evil is set in the middle of Russia. In Russian culture, the rebellion of the “Three Knights” is a well-know folk story and the FH artists bring a critical and playful eye to this traditional epic resulting in a new interpretation for the nature of heroism. In these images, the three knights become Russia, Europe and Asia - a kind of three-headed dragon and the new superheroes of the planet.
These images really are fantastic in my view. They show how photography is such an effective medium for conveying ideas, concepts and meaning. You could see the work of FH as being part of post-modernist photography, but I feel it goes well beyond this in the way in which codes and entendres are incorporated - the very subject of the SLC exhibition. I intend to research the previous work of FH.
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