ALEXANDRA POLINA: MADE IN ...
20 January – 17 February 2015
Polina is an artist and photographer from Uzbekistan who lives and works in Germany. She is the recipient of the first prize at the international competition Evening Projections as part of the Photonic Moments – Month of Photography 2014 festival in Ljubljana where the jury awarded her recent series of photographs Generation 60. The exhibitionMade in… however features a somewhat broader set of her works. Polina focuses on effects of tectonic socio-political changes in the former Soviet Union and on the phenomenon of migration, pointing out difficulties that migrants are dealing with in their new environment. Through predominantly staged photographs – formally and aesthetically thought out and occasionally clinical portraits of migrants who moved away from their country of origin for various reasons – she provides a reflection of the current social climate and of collective memory which is still present.
In her Generation 60 series of photographs Polina deals with the phenomenon elderly migrants whereby the age of migrants is directly proportional to the difficulty of their integration. These are lucid portraits of people who were over 60 years old when they moved to Germany, a new milieu and society, and were inflexible and rather resistant to any changes to their already fully formed lifestyles and world views. In the Made in USSR series of photographs Polina addresses the very opposite phenomenon; she portrays the generation of youngsters born in the 1980s (the generation to which she belongs) as Soviet citizens. Similarly, in former Yugoslavia, the same generation was raised with the spirit of brotherhood and unity, as young pioneers, and later witnessed the downfall of communism. The work therefore does not relate only to the milieu of former Soviet Union but could easily apply to local (Slovenian and Yugoslav) recent history.
Alexandra Polina (1984) studied Journalism at the National University of Uzbekistan, in Tashkent and Art and Design at the University of Applied Science, in Bielefeld where she is currently finishing her MA. She lives and works in Bielefeld, Germany.
