Whiteout

The project traces the afterlives of imperial expansion in the Arctic, where ideology and the politics of memory remain visible in landscapes and bodies as nature seeps into the urban fabric and militarization reshapes the territory.

Whiteout is set in Vorkuta, an Arctic city shaped by forced labour, coal mining, and anthropocentric narratives of progress. The work considers how a territory built around extraction continues to produce images of itself after the ideological and industrial systems that formed it have begun to collapse.

The project brings together photographs of Vorkuta with archival images found in local museums, newspapers, abandoned apartments, and public displays. Through rephotography, close observation, and repeated returns to the same sites, I trace how these images circulate, lose their original contexts, and become part of a shifting memory landscape.

In this Arctic terrain, geological, political, and historical layers converge, forming a fragile environment where time acquires an almost tangible presence—settling into architecture, infrastructure, and the human body. During the Soviet era, the conquest of this territory served as both a symbolic and a material assertion of power. Monumental architecture constructed a representational façade that obscured the systematic exploitation of both people and land. Today, eroded by climate and time, these structures remain as fragile remnants of a system that sought to impose rigid, hierarchical forms on reality.

Whiteout approaches this land as a layered political and geological space where histories of extraction and the politics of memory remain materially present. The project follows the afterlife of an imperial expansion, asking how images, bodies, and landscapes continue to bear its weight even as the structures that sustained it disappear.