Espacio/Jhannia Castro, in Porto presents the exhibition Staged. From Potemkin of the Austrian photographer, Gregor Sailer.
To describe the art of the facade, there is the term Potemkin Village. The term describes and constitutes an imposture. It designates villages suggested by false facades that hid misery in the eyes of the Tsarina during her journey through the new occupied regions in Crimea in 1787. This lie has long circulated to discredit Grigori Aleksandrovitch Potemkin, commander in chief of the Russian Army and lover of Catherine II. However, what was a falsification of history by the end of the 18th century is presented as the truth at the beginning of the 21st century. In fact, Gregor Sailer found it in today’s Russia, in cities whose entire avenues are made only of large canvases that make believe in the existence of huge office complexes, such as at the foot of the Ural, in Ufa, installed at the time of the BRICS summit and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in 2015, where they imitated Dachas, as was the case in Suzdal in 2013, during a visit of President Vladimir Putin.
The style of photographer Gregor Sailer is part of the “documentary style” with a rational approach to reality, revealing the architecture and the social structures that guide us, especially driven by the ambition to affirm certain truths about power relations that govern us. What qualifies the series The Potemkin Village, apart from the very advanced research work, is the rigor of the composition of the images, the homogenization of colors and lights, so that we glide smoothly from the Mojave desert to the snow-covered plains of Sweden. With this series, Gregor Sailer manages to place very diverse universes on the same level to compose his own: a world of depopulated and absurd facades, designed for destruction, lies or simply the collateral damage of an economy that tries to save itself by excess.
Gregor Sailer was born in Schwaz, Tyrol, Austria. He studied photography in the Prague School of Photography, and in the School of Photography and Optics from 2001 to 2002. Until 2007, He studied Communication Design, Focus on Photography and Experimental Film, in the University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Dortmund, where He also studied photography from 2012 to 2015.
Since 2005, He lives and works in Tyrol as photographer and designer.
Since He started to work as a photographer he won a lot of awards such as DAM Architectural Book Award 2018, European Architectural Photography Prize 2017, St. Leopold Friedenspreis in 2016. He has already exhibited all over the world, in particular his latest work “The Potemkin Village” has been exhibited in Centre de la Photographie in Genève, Switzerland; in the Freelens Galerie, in Hamburg, Germany; at the Galerie Fotografic, in Prague, Czech Republic; during the Rencontre d‘Arles, in France; in the Kehrer Galerie, in Berlin; and in the FO.KU.S, Foto Kunst Stadtforum, in Innsbruck, Austria.
Gregor Sailor : Staged. From the Potemkin Series
14th March to 2nd May.
Presentation of the book corresponding to the exhibition 2nd April
Espacio/ Jhannia Castro
Rua Adolfo Casais Monteiro, 16 (Oporto)
https://espaciojhanniacastro.com/
