Opening: Friday, 25 May 2012, 7 pm
Exhibition: 26 May – 22 July 2012
C/O Berlin
The more I tried to understand Russia, the more lost I became.
Russia is like a planet of its own.“ — Rafał Milach
‚Why does a photographer, or anyone with an ability to create narrative, gets drawn to a certain geographical territory to the point that he spends years in and out and most of his income to look at it at a close proximity? The sense of belonging, probably? He doesn’t have to like it or even come to understand the place, but he has to love it and all that comes with it: its people, food, drunkenness, taxi music and landscape. Rafal Milach has been haunted by Russia and its 7 people. He spent six years with those people in 3 cities: Moscow, Yekaterinburg and Krasnoyarsk. In their 30s, they are intermediates between the ineradicable Soviet mentality and the increasingly anxious Russian mind of today. Milach’s search is the kind which is almost impossible to visualize. And yet, what he has here, is a fascinating and subtle journey into the loss of direction, into the sad and beautiful connection with your country. You would be surprised that in all the richness of the Russian language, where there is a separate word for everything, the word ‘country’ means both the territory and the government…‘
Text by LIZA FAKTOR.
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C/O Berlin will be presenting the series „7 Rooms„ with 58 color photographs by Rafał Milach for the first time in Germany. A catalog accompanying the exhibition with texts by Svietlana Alexievich has been published by Kehrer Verlag.
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Rafał Milach is a documentary photographer based in Warsaw, Poland. He graduated Academy of Fine Arts in Katowice, Poland and ITF in Opava, Czech Republic. For more than 10 years he has been working on transition issues in Russian speaking countries and CEE region. This work resulted with the book called 7 Rooms (Kehrer Verlag 2011) and such essays as The Grey (2002), Wunderland (2006) or Black Sea of Concrete (2009). Rafal’s photos were exhibited in MoCA Shanghai and are the part of collection of Kiyosato Museum of Photographic Art in Japan. They have been also presented within Photoespana, Look3, Rencontres Photographiques d’Arles. In 2007 Rafał took part in Joop Swart Masterclass run by World Press Photo Foundation. Within next 3 years he received stipends from Polish Ministry of Culture, European Cultural Foundaion and Visegrad Fund. His Pictures have been awarded in World Press Photo, Pictures of the Year International, Photography Book Now and New York Photo Festival Awards.
In 2006 together with 10 other Central Eastern European photographers, Rafał created a photo collective Sputnik Photos, to document, promote and spread knowledge on transition issues in CEE countries. In 2011 Rafał became a guest lecturer of Institute for Creative Photography at the Silesian University in Opava / Czech Republic.
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More infos about the exhibition can be found at
→ www.co-berlin.info
To view more of Rafał’s work please visit his portfolio
→ www.rafalmilach.com
All photographs © Rafał Milach
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Related article(s) on ACMV:
→ C/O Berlin Book Days 2012 (May 25 + 26, 2012)
→ SLIDELUCK Berlin IV
