Sputnik Photos. Lost Territories: The New End (LTA 4)

The eponymous ‘new end’ yields some clues as to possible interpretations of the set of photographs from the Sputnik Photos archive. It foretells an apocalypse – but this apocalypse is neither absolute nor complete: merely a B catastrophe. It is with hope that we tend to speak of a new beginning, but a ‘new end’ sounds ridiculous; it is a state of suspension, an eternally open phenomenon. Will the end of the world as we know it be at all perceived from the perspective of an outlying district in Vitebsk or the Semey Oncology Center in Kazakhstan? Is the previous end something we have already been through? How many ends have there been so far? It comes as no surprise that the photographs from the Sputnik Photos archive, taken exclusively in the former republics of the Soviet Union, stir political imagination – especially nowadays when the demons of the Cold War awake and ‘facts’ are generated by internet trolls, fantasising about the reconstruction of the Soviet empire. Not that long ago we said our goodbyes to history and celebrated its end. Let us greet it once more: shivering in anticipation of a new end, let us contemplate the ruins of old orders.

Curator: Sebastian Cichocki;
Artists: Andrej Balco, Jan Brykczyński, Andrei Liankevich, Michał Łuczak, Rafał Milach, Agnieszka Rayss, Adam Pańczuk