East Side Story:New East Photo Prize 2018.

"There is nothing permanent except change" - Heraclitus.

I had a nice day yesterday. Much of it was spent with Sanda in a coffee shop on Kingsland Road gossiping, drinking hot chocolate, and pilfering slices of her red velvet cake, even more spent watching television, but I did, as I so often do, find time for some art. I briefly popped in to the Whitechapel Gallery to have a look at the Jackson Pollock they currently have on show but, before that, I visited one of my old favourites, the Calvert 22 near Arnold Circus.

To take in their New East Photo Prize. A fairly self-explanatory affair that welcomes the work of both professional and non-professional (I certainly couldn't tell the difference) photographers from across the twenty-nine countries that make up the 'new East', a definition of Eastern Europe that pans out to include the former Soviet republics of Central Asia.

The finalists came from Azerbaijan, Croatia, Hungary, Latvia, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, and Ukraine but the submissions had come from many more countries. It really was a, free, celebration of diversity and collaboration across borders and at a time when nativism, nationalism, jingoism, and plain old-fashioned racism are, once again, on the rise it could hardly be more timely.

Lana Stojicevic - Sunny Side

Lana Stojicevic - Sunny Side

A celebration of both what we share but also a celebration of our differences. I wasn't really sure what some of the photos represented but that made me curious, not hateful. In fact, the series Sunny Side by Lana Stojicevic (who hails from Sibenik in Croatia, much like my companion for the afternoon, Sanda) was both the most baffling, and my favourite, collection in the entire exhibition.

So what is going on her photos? It is some kind of sanatorium? A deranged prison of the future? A spaceship? Luckily, there's a brochure on hand and said brochure informs us that it's a swimming pool complex at the Zora Hotel in Primosten, Croatia. A futuristic, now retrofuturistic, device that pointed towards a bright new communist future. One, that we all know, never quite came.

What's great about the photos is not just that they look so odd, but that they're so open to interpretation. The work of the Latvian photographer, Alnis Stakle, too, asks you to create your own narrative, weave your own story from the images provided. Like Sunny Side, it's a peek into the world of leisure, health, and spa retreats. These slightly grey beaches are those of Crimea and since the Soviet Union came to an end they've been incorporated into Ukraine, undergone years of decay, witnessed the loss of jobs and industry, and, most recently, they've been famously annexed by Russia.

Alnis Stakle - Heavy Waters

Alnis Stakle - Heavy Waters

Vika Eksta - The Devil's Lake

Vika Eksta - The Devil's Lake

The 'new East' may have a lot in common but there's also a lot of difference. One thing many of the smaller countries share is a concern about the growing might, and interference in the affairs of neighbours (as well as countries further afield), of Putin's ever more aggressive Russia. 

Vita Eksta, another Latvian snapper, has turned away from the politics, the cities even. Almost as if in disgust. Though, perhaps, Vita simply hopes to capture the beauty, the eternal mystery, of nature. I was reminded of the Romantic landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich, Sanda said the photos had something of the Gregory Crewdson about them.

Azerbaijan's Ilkin Huseynov looks out on less idyllic scenes. Grey, overcast skies barely differ in colour to the slightly browner, dusty paths and silty rivers that make up his Shared Waters series. These are documents of the daily lives of the marginalised communities that live along the Kura-Araks River Basin in Huseynov's country. A place where both industry and tourism have dried up and the hotels that once were full of holiday makers now house displaced persons from the decades long Nagorno Karabkh conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia.

Ilkin Huseynov - Shared Waters

Ilkin Huseynov - Shared Waters

Karol Palka - Edifice

Karol Palka - Edifice

Karol Palka (Poland) also looks to have created a series, Edifice, about abandoned spaces. What's left when humans move, or are forced to move, on. The interiors of former communist buildings in his native Poland, as well as Slovakia and the former East Germany, are almost the last word in faded glamour, a testament to the impermanence of power and a warning of how quickly things can change. A warning, perhaps, against complacency. 

Edifice includes shots of the Polana Hotel, a Socialist Realist building previously owned by the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia that was once visited by Nikita Khruschev and Fidel Castro. Now Khrushchev, Castro, communism (for the most part), and even Czechoslovakia are all no more. This selection is, by any reckoning, a memento mori.

The fact we all must, and will, die is so terrifying you simply have to look away, or sit down in one's kitchen with a strategically placed blanket over your noggin. But that's now what the Slovak photographer Lucia Sekerkova is aiming for. That's just me making a lame link between her work and that of Palka's.

Sekerkova's Vrajitoare is about goddesses, healer, fortune tellers, and witches. All part of the traditions of the Roma people and, in the case of Vrajitoare, the Roma people of Romania. Vrajitoare is actually a catch all word for the women who practice these occupations. In the past they'd travel from town to town, ensured of anonymity by their transient nature. Nowadays, you can find a goddess, a fortune teller, or a witch on social media. Girls as young as nine years old may even be starting out in these professions.

Lucia Sekerkova - Vrajitoare

Lucia Sekerkova - Vrajitoare

Antal Banhegyesy - Orthodoxia

Antal Banhegyesy - Orthodoxia

As with the swimming pools, the resorts, and the abandoned communist era edifices, Sekerkova's photos flesh out part of what, when you take a step back, becomes the overarching narrative of this exhibition. It's about change. How the 'new East' has changed, and is changing, how the buildings of  the 'new East' have changed, and are changing, and, most of all, of how the people of the 'new East' have changed, and are changing. 

From Cluj-Napoca in Romania, Antal Banehgyesy's contribution, Orthodoxia, looks at how the orthodox church has changed. The fall of communism, and this was a story that Sanda was able to confirm to me from her visits back to Croatia, has seen religion, and often a quite fundamentalist take on religion, filling the void. In Croatia, Catholicism has seen a boom. But in Romania, it is the Orthodox church that has risen. 

Since the death of Ceausescu, more than 7000 Orthodox churches have been built in Romania, the equivalent of two churches consecrated every day for the last twenty-seven years. It would be nice to think that critical thinking, secularism, and humanism had taken more of a foothold, but, sadly, it seems religion, and the attendant hatred that so often goes with it, has been the system to feel the benefit. A warning, again, against, this time, our own complacency.

One thing about the orthodox church I won't knock though is the architecture. Some of it is pretty good. But I don't think any of it is as impressive as the abandoned (or sometimes modified) public and industrial buildings that Hungary's Peter Trembeczki has brought to our attention.

Again, they are testaments to change, monuments to the past, but on a purely aesthetic level they're a joy, recalling the typologies of Bernd and Hilla Becher or even the modernist American paintings of Charles Sheeler and Ralston Crawford.

Peter Trembeczki - Victory

Peter Trembeczki - Victory

Fyodor Telkov - Ural Mari

Fyodor Telkov - Ural Mari

Fyodor Telko's Ural Mari stands out, mostly because the Russian photographer is the only contributor to this exhibition to opt for a strictly monochrome palette. I've written before about how I've long suspected that black and white photography is lazy shorthand for style or taste and whenever I see it, straight away I'm thinking 'emperor's new clothes' and though I'll give Telkov the benefit of the doubt I didn't find his work to be one of the highlights of my afternoon.

The story behind them is good though. They're taken around the sacred site of Kjusjo-kurky (Prayer Mountain) near the village of Bolshaya Tavra, the only remaining place of worship for the Ural Mari people who fled eastwards following Ivan the Terrible's 16c siege of Kazan which saw the population forced into Christianity. In this remote wilderness the Ural Mari people have been able to continue with their Pagan beliefs and rituals. Throughout this exhibition we learn how politics and religion, when combined, can be an utterly corrupting and often deadly force.

It is my contention that our current age of fake news, alternative facts, and straight out bullshit is happening partly because politicians are following the example of religious leaders and making empty promises and vainglorious threats, seemingly safe in the knowledge (and unaware of what happened to Ceausescu) that nobody can do anything about it. Witness Putin poisoning the Skripals (nothing done about it) or MBS and his goons having Jamal Khashoggi tortured and murdered (nothing done about it, pardoned by Trump like a Thanksgiving turkey) and tell me I'm wrong. There's certainly something very 'biblical' about all this death and murder.  

Join the Cool (Anastasiya Lazurenko, Daria Svertilova, Kristina Podobed and Genia Volkov) - Vinietka (Ukrainian graduation album)

Join the Cool (Anastasiya Lazurenko, Daria Svertilova, Kristina Podobed and Genia Volkov) - Vinietka (Ukrainian graduation album)

The old men who run the world are doing their best to make it a terrible place for everyone else who lives in it. You'll all know someone who rants and raves about how the old days were better, how young people have no respect, dress terribly, and listen to shit music. Taken to its logical, or illogical extreme, we end up with people so determined to prove this true that they'll make it true. Self-fulfilling prophecies by proxy.

Looking at the work of (the admittedly terribly named, he says immediately contradicting himself) Join the Cool collective, we can see that youth culture looks much like it always has done. Shot around the outskirts of the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, it features moody youngsters, couples snogging on staircases, and, most of all, the wide eyed openness of youth. A time of life when change seems possible. These photos stand out from others in the exhibition because they look forward, hopefully, to future change rather than back, often ruefully, to changes that have already happened.

As aesthetically pleasing as they are, that is not something you could say for the Polish photographer Michal Sierakowski's collection, Wild Fields. Set in the Ukrainian countryside, it, like the works of Alnis Stakle. tries to tell, briefly and prismatically, an honest story of the last three decades of Ukrainian history. How the country has strived to form an independent, forward looking, nation and how symbolic motifs have been utilised to create this image. But, also, sadly, of how that has not always been easy. How the Russian government and army have tried to stop them and, also, how internal politics has stymied much progress. A rusting crane makes for a great photographs but probably not a great economy.

Michal Sierakowski - Wild Fields

Michal Sierakowski - Wild Fields

Michael Solarski - Infirmi

Michael Solarski - Infirmi

That's a lot to get from four or five photos but I'm on a roll (and I mostly write this for myself anyway, so what the fuck?). Michal Solarski also hails from Poland and he, too, has taken the subject matter of former Soviet sanatoriums (this time in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, as well as Crimea).

Put together with his compatriot Adam Wilkoszarski's After Season (shot in Finland and Romania together with Poland) they tell a tale of abandonment. Solarski looks at the decay of the leisure/sanatorium industry in former Soviet countries and Wilkoszarski the emptiness of hotels and beaches once the tourist hordes depart. But they both speak to a deeper, more human than political, feeling. There's a sadness in them and it's the same kind of sadness that comes with the dark nights drawing in, a Sunday night when there's school tomorrow, or watching a lover walk off into the distance, possibly for the last time. It's all a bit after the Lord Mayor's show.

Adam Wilkoszarski - After Season

Adam Wilkoszarski - After Season

Elena Subach and Viacheslav Poliakov - City of Gardens

Elena Subach and Viacheslav Poliakov - City of Gardens

The bright colours of Ukraine's Elena Subach and Viacheslav Poliakov, briefly, lift the gloom. As well as showing a novel, and seemingly workable, way forward for cities who have lost their major industries. Katowice in southern Poland was once an important centre of coal mining and steel production but, with both decimated, it has been rebranded a 'city of gardens' and a crossroads between east and west. It may not, almost certainly doesn't, tell the whole story but it shows, like the youthful Ukrainian graduates, that change is not always to be feared. 

Something that possibly depends on who is driving the change and why. A lot of change, we can see it in Brexit  and with the election of Bolsonaro in Brazil, is driven by those who promise a return to a golden age that never really existed. Heroes of the past are worked long after their death to serve an agenda that may, or may not, have been absolute anathema to them. What these people really stood for no longer matters, it's what they're believed to stand for. We build monuments to famous people but, truth be told, our memory of the celebrated becomes a monument itself and much like actual statues, sometimes the likeness isn't so great.

Yekaterinburg's Daria Granik looks at the commodification of the first man in space, Yuri Gagarin, by visiting his hometown in Gzhatsk. The cosmonaut was soon made a cult hero, then a prime piece of Soviet propaganda and even his car has been preserved in a glass case, like a religious artefact or a piece of the true cross. Almost as if anything that has been touched by this great man has been invested with his power and, somehow, bestows that power on those who come to worship or gawp at it. When, in truth, it's just a car - which is interesting enough in itself.

Daria Garnik - Gagarin

Daria Garnik - Gagarin

Boglarka Eva Zellei (of Budapest, Hungary) looks at the ongoing Christian practice of baptism, either in a river or, it seems, a paddling pool. A ceremony that has existed for two thousand years and, making it something of an outlier in this show, has changed very little. 

Many things change, some things never change, religion weaves its pernicious thread through contemporary discourse as ever it has done and we, visitors and photographers, alike try to make some kind of sense of it all. Perhaps there is no sense to be made of this crazy world we live in. But in lieu of sense we at least have beauty, and many of the photographs in the New East Photo Prize of 2018 captured that beauty, often in places we'd least expect to find it.

Thanks to Sanda for, as ever, the delightful company, the crucial input into my assessment of this show, and, of course, those slices of red velvet cake. Same time next year?

Boglarka Eva Zellei - Furnishing the Sacred

Boglarka Eva Zellei - Furnishing the Sacred