From February 11, 2022, Lumiere Gallery presents photographs by Danila Tkachenko. A display of 30 superb author prints of delicacy and density.

Danila Tkachenko travelled for four years in Russia, Ukraine, Bulgaria and Kazakhstan in search of architectural traces of the Soviet period—like fragments of a past that was definitely ineffectual.

Danila Tkachenko photographs iconic symbols of Soviet modernist architecture. This series has sometimes been understood as a form of symbolic burial of communist utopia. No doubt. More broadly, we can see a variation on the gender of vanity, human vanity and vanity of any ideology that would reject Eden into an uncertain future.

But – and this is what makes the strength of this exhibition – Danila’s photography

Tkachenko sheds a strangely ambivalent light on these forgotten projects: the beauty of abandoned buildings and as laid on the snow is also an ode to the glory of the human spirit and its insatiable need for dreams.