Project description

I was born in the USSR in an ordinary Soviet family. My family survived in Perestroika and in roaring 90s. On September 13th, 2001, my father committed suicide. This was a devastating event for my family, and it took years to accept his decision. I wanted to understand the reasons behind it, which led me to explore his photo archive. My father loved photography, leaving behind 35 black-and-white film rolls and many color slides.

After his death, I began piecing together who he really was. I discovered that he had been a cryptographer in the KGB’s government communications department. His work was classified, and he never discussed it at home. My sister and I only knew him as a programmer or coder—brilliant at math, and unusually for the time, he even had a personal notebook in the late 1980s. That time I had heard of the KGB but never grasped what it really was. Learning about my father's secret life made me want to dig deeper.

My research included scanning his archives (even after relocating from Russia to Armenia and later Dubai in 2022), gathering memories from my mother, reading books and memoirs by ex-KGB officers, searching in the archives for documents, reconstructing historical contexts, and engaging in performances and exhibitions. The project evolved from personal therapy into an exploration of how secrecy—especially in the hands of a repressive state—can be destructive. 

Now the project has a form of a photobook. It is divided into two parts. In the first part I try to reconstruct my father’s secret life using his photos and documents that reveal events in the country. The second part captures the everyday life of a Soviet/Russian family through photos, drawings, and propaganda symbols that surrounded me as a child and teenager.

What struck me most was the contrast between aggressive political realities and peaceful family photos. How can we be so happily death and blind, knowing about all of that oppressive and aggressive actions of our country?