Pact of Silence
22 photographs, C-print, 7-channel sound, 2016The piece consists of 22 re-photographed traces of photographs that had been torn out of a photo album from the Soviet labor camp (1923 – 1937) on the Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea, alongside a multi-channel sound installation that re-tells the story of the photo album as a museum object. The work displays the photo album as a pictorial genre that is directly related to speech and storytelling. Over time, its invisible component - the story - disappears, and with it the means for understanding are lost as well. There are only photographs left for interpretation and analysis, a mnemonic device in which one might recognize a pattern: the mechanism behind the construction of a narrative.
