Lost Horizon

Lost Horizon visualises the utopia of constructing the ideal world. Or rather, half-forgotten traces and ruins of this utopia: the Soviet architecture and technical buildings, which symbolically affirmed the technical progress and advance of the communist future.

The artist makes images of these objects, built by Soviet authorities, during the night and with a powerful light source. He encloses them in the suprematist figure of the black square referring to the work of Kazimir Malevich, the early Russian avant-garde and the origins of the Soviet utopia.

The radical refusal of the old, and the belief in the beginning of the new, ideal cosmic life, devoted to the liberated human, unifies the aesthetic project of the Russian avant-garde and the political project of the Soviet power. If the 'Black Square' was the artistic embodiment of utopia, then the Soviet rule was its social implementation.

Time has brought back the original meaning of utopia: u-topos is the absent place, place of nowhere. Presently, USSR is the utopia in its most strict sense.

Artist Profile(s)

Danila Tkachenko

Danila Tkachenko

Danila Tkachenko was born in Moscow in 1989. In 2014 he graduated from the Rodchenko Moscow School of Photography and Multimedia, department of documentary photography (supervisor Valeriy Nistratov). In the same year he was winner of the World Press Photo 2014 competition with the project Escape which he worked on for 3 years. In March 2015 he finished the project Restricted Areas which has already received a number of international awards including European Publishers Award For Photography, Burn Magazine grant, and included in the Dutch magazine Foam Talents. The series was published in such magazines as BBC Culture, The Guardian, IMA Magazine, GUP Magazine, British Journal of Photography. At the moment Danila Tkachenko is working on two projects which are being shot in a significant part of Russian territory and several neighbouring countries.