Griffin’s Gaze

Altai *… These mountains and valleys keep in memory Scythian and Turkic nomads. Multiple burial mounds, petroglyphs by ancient artists and silent stone sculptures tell us History - lost in Time, long as the Silky Way …

This series arose from my desire to convey not history only but the sounding of this country itself barely heard yet from the strata of Time. By scanty means, with obligatory cinematic sequence of monochrome, realistic pictures I build up the archetypal image (eidos) of this ancient, diverse country - and, no matter how paradoxical - on the basis of fragments of today's reality, through collecting the crumbs of its  residual chronoengine radiation.

​In other words, it is an attempt to evoke in myself some kind of super-personal memory through mobilizing some tiniest scraps of knowledge and memories that actually are not even mine, about this world that sunk into oblivion. Temporal distance here is quite adequate to cultural one.

​The first few pictures are the angle, the perception code creating specific mood passing through the whole series the main goal of which is its poetics, its transcendental emotions.

Traces of Time that spiritualize spaces are inexorably melting under the onslaught of unbridled civilization penetrating deeper and deeper into spaces sacral and sacred for the ancient ethnoi. Space is changing, so are the people. The river of Time flows, wrapped in dense fog.

* Altai - the mountainous country in northern Asia, where borders of four states - Russia, Mongolia, China and Kazakhstan - join each other, with their different historical destinies still remaining within the space of different languages ​​and religions