Sasha Rudensky: Acts and Illusions

Wednesday September 13, 2017 - Sunday December 10, 2017
Sasha Rudensky: Acts and Illusions

Sasha Rudensky, Night Market, from the series Tinsel and Blue, 2012, 40 x 57 inches. Archival pigment print. © Sasha Rudensky, courtesy of the artist and Sasha Wolf Projects.

For more than a decade, Sasha Rudensky has repeatedly returned to Russia and the post-Soviet territories with her camera. Her photographs track a lost generation that has come of age during the Putin Era—a time of political upheaval, ideological uncertainty, and unhinged materiality. This exhibition highlighted twenty-four photographs from Rudensky’s series Remains (2004–2007), Eastern Eve (2009–2014), and Tinsel and Blue (2009–2015). Shifting between social document and fantasy, truth and illusion, and banality and decadence, these meticulously observed and constructed images present an unsettling view into contemporary life in the New East.

 

Related Events:

Opening reception and gallery talk
Wednesday, September 13, 2017, 5:00 pm
Gallery talk by Sasha Rudensky, Assistant Professor of Art, 5:30 pm

At the Border of Truth: Photographing the New East
Sasha Rudensky, Assistant Professor of Art
Tuesday, September 26, 2017, 5:00 pm
Ring Family Performing Arts Hall, Center for the Arts
Sasha Rudensky gave an artist’s lecture focusing on her series of photographic and video projects completed in Russia, Ukraine, and the greater New East region between 2004 and 2017. These projects examine the slow dissolution of Soviet consciousness, the ideological vacuum left in its wake, and the reconstitution of new post-Soviet identities.

Panel Discussion
Wednesday, November 1, 2017, 5:00 pm
Ring Family Performing Arts Hall, Center for the Arts
Speakers included author Sophie Pinkham; Sasha Rudensky; Peter Rutland, Colin and Nancy Campbell Professor in Global Issues and Democratic Thought, and Professor of Government, the College of Social Studies (CSS), and Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies (REES); Victoria Smolkin, Assistant Professor of History, CSS, and REES; and moderated by Clare Rogan, Curator, Davison Art Center, and Susanne Fusso, Chair and Professor of REES.
Panel discussion sponsored by the REES Program and the Davison Art Center.