Project "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. I make photos of these objects, built by Soviet authorities, by the medium format camera 6x6, during the night and with a powerful light source. Thus I enclose them in a suprematist figure of the black square which refers to the "Black Square" by 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.

The 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.

«Motherland» is a memorial project, a farewell to already dead and not functioning constructions.

The project "Restricted Areas" is about utopian strive of humans for technological progress.

Humans are always trying to own ever more than they have - this is the source of technical progress, which was the means to create various commodities, standards, as well as the tools of violence in order to keep the power over others.

Better, higher, stronger - these ideals often express the main ideology of the governments, for these goals they are ready to sacrifice almost everything. While the individual is supposed to become a tool for reaching the set goals, and receive in exchange the higher level of comfort.

I travel in search of places which used to have great importance for the technical progress - and which are now deserted. Those places lost their significance together with the utopian ideology which is now obsolete. Secret cities that cannot be found on maps, forgotten scientific triumphs, abandoned buildings of almost inhuman complexity. The perfect technocratic future that never came.

Any progress comes to its end earlier or later, it can happen due to different reasons - nuclear war, economic crisis or natural disaster.. For me it's interesting to witness what is left after.