Archipelago was created during an artist residency at Metenkov House of Photography Museum, Yekaterinburg, in March 2019. The photographs for the project were shot in places of Mid-Urals, Russia, related in one way or another to a broad idea of isolation, that is, near penitentiaries, psychiatric hospitals, restricted-access military towns, as well as inside and around a pretrial detention center. Isolation is an important element of the post-Soviet cultural, political-economic and social-psychological identity while the institutions supporting it, such as the military industrial complex, primary industries, police, ideological and penitentiary systems, dominate, both symbolically and literally, the economy, politics, culture, and, in many places, the visible landscape
