IGOR SAMOLET
Reconstruction
(Moscow, Russia)
The artist created this installation based on his everyday digital content: here, the production and consumption of digital content is his main creative method. By chronicling his reactions to external (historical) and internal (personal) circumstances, the artist sublimates this reaction into the experience of a generation. Samolet’s works are documentary in nature. In them, the screenshot as a record of digital presence plays the role of a “pivotal moment.”
In his new work, Samolet uses a рhotographic image of Gaza House of Culture’s frieze, a work by sculptor Leopold Dietrich dedicated to the history of the Kirov District. The artist extends the linear narrative of the frieze, drawing on his рersonal digital content. The memorial chamber’s architecture is formed by tiles, but what is it dedicated to? We can only guess. Yet some things are certain: the artist is outlining the confines of his memory amidst the collective flux of history, connecting рersonal moments to those of history, and searching for the рoint of transition between them, where something рersonal, important only to you, becomes a monument for many, the leitmotif of a whole generation.
Igor Samolet was born in 1984 in the north of Russia. In 2013, he graduated from the Rodchenko Moscow School of Photography and Multimedia with a major in Project Photography. In 2013, he released a photo book called Be Happy!, which received the silver medal at the 2014 German Photobook Awards and was included in the third volume of The Photobook: A History, edited by Martin Parr. Samolet’s installation Drunk Confessions and solo show Breakfast for Artem were shortlisted for the Innovation Prize in 2018. He was a recipient of a Garage Museum of Contemporary Art grant in 2018–19 and 2019–20. In 2019, Igor Samolet was awarded the prestigious Credit Suisse Cosmoscow Prize for Young Artists. In 2019, his solo exhibition Energy of a Mistake was shown at the Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow.Samolet has shown work at FOTO WIEN, the 7th Triennial of Photography Hamburg, Athens Photo Festival 2018, Circulation(s) 2018: Festival of Young European Photography, Plat(t)form 2018, the 10th Moscow International Biennale of Fashion and Style in Photography, Voices Off Festival, f/stop Festival for Photography 2016, Riga Photomonth, Manifesta 10, the Vienna Photobook Festival, the Ural Industrial Biennale, steirischerherbst'20, and elsewhere.