“Through several photographic series and installations, the artist constructs spaces that envelop viewers and draw them into his memories. The figure of the mother also emerges through this fragile logic of protection in Maman sous cellophane. A photograph of the artist’s mother was carefully wrapped in a cellophane bag by friends before undertaking a long journey to France. She appears as a child, most likely in a school portrait. For many people who grew up in Soviet or post-Soviet countries, the aesthetic remains immediately recognizable: the backdrop, the carefully posed posture, the very texture of the photograph. Behind this codified format, there also appears a child’s smile—something immediate and intact.

This work may recall certain artistic practices of the 1960s and 1970s, in which ordinary objects and portraits became carriers of political and personal memory, often linked to displacement. But here, it is not necessarily a deliberate artistic reference. Rather, one senses a strange temporal loop: the work, in a language that seems to come from the past, speaks about the present while revealing the way certain histories return and repeat themselves. It evokes an era we naively believed had passed, yet one that continues to produce violent displacements, losses, and ruptures. In response, persistence takes the form of simple gestures: preserving an image, transporting archives in bags or suitcases, protecting fragments of memory by transforming them.

Cellophane thus signifies both protection and distance. The image is protected because it is precious, out of fear that it might be damaged. Yet it is also viewed through a layer of plastic, as though the past remained visible while becoming impossible to reach directly.

The artist’s mother also appears through her voice. Approaching the work, one hears a voice message recorded during an ordinary day and yet profoundly moving. The voice—a fragment of an intimate, unpremeditated conversation—introduces a sudden sense of closeness into the exhibition.”

Text by Sasha Baydal