Reflections.

SEEING THE PRESENT THROUGH THE PAST.

As a digital artist and an art historian, I found a new mode of self-expression by reflecting on the present through past mediums. This series explores political art activism in a historical mode of expression of 1920s collages, by incorporating elements such as the appropriated newspaper cut-outs and sketches in relation to my photographs – achieved by Adobe Photoshop tools and Procreate app which combined and altered these elements digitally. In addition, the black-and-white choice of my series (with the exception of one photograph) was a conscious decision to highlight the surreality and draw a comparison of the past with the present, such as the question of the surveillance system (going off Dziga Vertov’s concept of the Kino-Eye) outlined by a digital drawing of an eye atop the surveillance cameras. Some other photographs with clear use of digital art and shapes in colour signify a merging of Futurism, Suprematism and Bauhaus. While another photomontage, specifically references the newspaper cut-outs in relation to the photograph of a home-like cloth material (echoing, though contemporary yet with elements influenced by the 20s photomontages, Martha Rosler’s response to the Vietnam War: Cleaning the Drapes from the series House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home, 1967–72) – where in between the cloth material a list of profile-faces of individuals are placed in an askew line: referencing the displacement of numerous individuals due to the war in Ukraine. In a sense, echoing the concept of archival documentation (in black-and-white) and, personally, of the Holocaust’s identification and registration photography, the marking system of the prisoners of the war. Though at a glance, the photographs’ context may seem different – they are all tied back together by the Surrealist and Dadaist newspaper cut-outs as symbolising elements of art as a historically active function – demonstrating a return to the past, an echo, in our present.

Senia Magzumov, 2023.