Series - FotoSlovo 2026 - Category « Conceptual photography »

Intergalactic War Photography: Windows of Distant Wars

Initiated in 2012, this long-term project unfolds across eight chapters, combining documentary, personal narrative, and speculative fiction. Each chapter operates as both an independent body of work and part of a larger system, extending beyond images into objects and material gestures.

This chapter shifts into a fictional mode. Produced in hotel rooms across different cities, it consists of ephemeral drawings made with color markers directly onto windows. These surfaces, overlooking unfamiliar urban landscapes, function as both medium and threshold—where private memory intersects with external space.

The drawings depict imagined scenes of future warfare, fragmented and cosmic, detached from terrestrial logic. Rather than projecting a technological future, they return to childhood impressions shaped by Soviet-era science fiction movies, books, architecture etc. These influences are not directly referenced but re-emerge through memory, forming images that oscillate between intimacy and distance, past and future.

Drawing on glass is central to the work. Windows act as temporary screens—simultaneously transparent and reflective—where images are inscribed and inevitably erased. This impermanence resists stability, aligning the work with the fragility of memory and speculative vision. Each drawing exists only during the artist’s stay, leaving no trace beyond its documentation.

Within this framework, the hotel room becomes a provisional studio, and the city beyond remains both backdrop and witness. The work navigates tensions between presence and disappearance, documentation and invention.

Windows of Distant Wars ultimately revisits a formative visual language shaped by childhood imaginaries, reactivated through travel and displacement. It is not a projection of the future, but a reconstruction of how the future was once imagined.