Unrequited Land

Fake Archive

Unrequited Land poses a question of historical reliability. The project is presented as a reenactment of a personal archive. It contains darkroom prints, film, old-fashioned book pages, digital prints, and handwritten notes. The assemblage brings confusion to the time period that it belongs to.  It is intentionally an inaccurate reconstruction that creates an imaginary persona of a supposed owner. This fictional character is a representation of a collective mindset in a post-Soviet space.  It shows nostalgia, paradoxical fascination with the USSR and religious piety that borders with superstition. Some of the items in this fake archive are found objects from an actual family archive, some of the images, however, are also deceptively “fake”. The imagery is, in fact, generated with AI on the basis of the artist`s own film photographs. Mistakes of the AI generation are clues to the forgery of the improvised collection. Therefore, this archive provides images of places and events that do not exist. The recreation then serves as a metaphor for a lost home. A fondly cherished memory of homeland is distorted by current political turmoil.