Maryna Shtanko - Pop-Soviet
Being born in a post-Soviet country, it is especially interesting to explore the period of the USSR. How was it to live in a ‘utopian’ country of equality and proletariat? What was it like to be a part of a single entity that contained so many different republics with their own traditions and history? And what might have happened had history turned in a different direction?
After the Soviet Dissolution, the post-Soviet countries were overwhelmed by new exotic Western culture – new food, new clothes, new TV shows. In this project, I tried to imagine the world in which the merging of different cultures happens much earlier – right after WWII, as if the Cold War had never happened.
American pop-art comic book culture, recreated by Roy Lichtenstein, merges with photographs taken from my family archive that document Soviet daily life.
Ordinary everyday scenes cease to be so when they merge with a riot of colours, the combination of which carries almost metaphysical undertones.