Anisia Kuzmina

Freeze

Moscow Museum of Modern Art and Open Workshops present Freeze, an exhibition of works by Anisia Kuzmina. The project is a part of the XI International Month of Photography in Moscow PHOTOBIENNALE 2016. Dating back to 2011, Freeze is a photographic study of the possibility of understanding of a person through an object. The result of five years’ work is a series of one hundred photos of people, who were invited to make a portrait with «their favorite thing».

By limiting the number of participants to a 100 the artist inscribes her project into the tradition of sociological research, associated with objectivity and impartiality. Anonymity, achieved by blurring the faces of the people portrayed creates ideal conditions for the study of personality through one object. Individual preferences manifest themselves not only in the choice of a particular thing, but also in how participants understand their task. Some select an object they use in their work; for others the chosen object represents a memory. Some people’s choice is clearly ironic and subverts the task. In other portraits, the person portrayed becomes the object.

On the one hand, the invitation to choose and show offone’s favorite thing seems to encourage each participant to explore his or her uniqueness and originality. On the other hand, the project raises the question of the possibility of individuality in the world saturated with things and the significance of material matters in the contemporary society. Is the man the measure of all things or have a thing become the measure of the man?

The exhibition consists of three parts. The first part is devoted to the world of things, which exist independently without any labels and masters. The second and the third parts focus on the relationship of the object and the human in the world, where due to a displacement of contexts, a person can become somebody else’s «favorite thing».

Freeze by Anisia Kuzmina offers a documentation of contemporary condition, where not only people have become invisible behind many things, but also the thing as such is lost, becoming an object of choice.