De haut en bas Serguei Tchilikov Russian Regions, 1993-1995 Leonid Tishkov et Boris Bendikov La lune privée, 2003-2005 Georgy Pervov Totalrealism, 2002 Igor Moukhine Moscou, 1988 Vlad Loktev 1 : 0, 1999. Projet pour le magazine l'Officiel. Nikolai Polisski La tour, 2000

23 June - 29 August 2010 Russian photography is best known for the outstanding avant-garde work of Alexander Rodtchenko, El Lissitzky, Gustav Kloutsis and Lef magazine, in the form of photomontages glorifying Bolshevism, and New Vision photographs: low-angled shots, close-ups, oblique shots, fragmentations, etc. But it is also, unfortunately, known for the standardized products of socialist realism, when Stalin rose to power and elminiated all the avant-gardes, replacing them with art and photography whose only function was to glorify the regime and the Little Father of the People. For decades there was only silence and oppression, even if some people had the courage to risk their lives resisting. It was only with Perestroïka, at the end of the 1980s, that non-offical art re-emerged, arising from an underground culture. The individual gradually took over from the collective, and everything had to be reinvented: new forms, new themes, new ways of showing, in newspapers, galleries and Biennales and in different countries. It became urgent to shrug off the old ideological trappings, to look at the real face of Russia and to record it in pictures. Documentary work - because it is intended as a faithful interpretation of reality- was clearly one of the preferred visual forms, along with street photography, which recorded, in a kind of living immediacy, the energy flows in Russian cities. Its chief proponents include Alexander Abasa, Yevgeny Kondatov, Yuri Kozyrev, Vladimir Mishukov, Georgy Pervov, Valeri Schchekoldin, Vladimir Siomin, Aleksander Sliusarev, Vladimir Viatkin, Mikhail Yevstafiev, and perhaps above all Igor Mukhin, who showed himself to be particularly attentive to the complex dialectic between the remains of defunct communism and the emergence of aggressive liberal capitalism. All these photographers endeavour to describe and analyse a country in the throes of often contradictory transformations. But although documentary photography is a powerful aspect of the contemporary Russian scene, this does not preclude the existence of what is referred to in French as "photographie plasticienne", a form of photography that lays claim to a place in art history and refuses académic categorizations. Some artists use photography although they do not think of themselves as photographers, such as Serguei Bratkov, Olga Chernijshova, the Fenso group, Vladimir Kuprianov, Vladislav Mamyshev-Monro, Ilia Piganov, Arsen Savadov, and above all Oleg Kulik and the AES+F group. Oleg Kulik, the " dog-man " who carries out performance pieces naked, barking and biting passers-by, spotlights the humanistic dichotomy of Man and Beast, pointing with unselfconscious aggressiveness to the natural savagery that lies beneath our superficially cultured skin. The AES+F group violently takes issue with naive representations of childhood, rising up against the presumed innocence of children and referring instead to the brutality of video games, wars and massacres, in spare, cold photographs and videos infected with terror and fear, featuring children with pure faces and perfect bodies hypnotically preparing to kill each other, like the worst warriors in wars to come... And so the body, banished by Stalinism and as always likely to veer into pornography, returns to the photographic image. It also does this via the more glamorous genre of fashion photography, whose major proponents since the 1990s include Vladimir Fridkes, Vladimir Glynin, Mikhail Koroliov, Yevfrosina Lavrukhina, and Vlad Loktev. This exhibition at the MEP makes no attempt to be exhaustive, but it nonetheless reflects the extraordinary diversity and vitality of contemporary Russian photography. Curated by Olga Sviblova Part of the France-Russia Year 2010, in collaboration with the Multimedia Centre for Contemporary Art, Moscow with support from the Federation of Russia Culture Ministry and CulturesFrance. www.france-russie2010.fr Sponsored by Figaroscope, France Culture et Kusmi Tea. Guided visits : guided visits are available for groups schools, subscribers and individual visitors. For more information, see "Events/Guided Visits".