The Ringing Trace: capturing the invisible legacy of a Soviet nuclear catastrophe, Masha Borodacheva, "The Calvert Journal", February, 18, 2022
Pavel Otdelnov Building of the Former Dormitory of Laboratory B, Sergey Guskov, "ARTFORUM", September, 2021
Calling for Action, Ekaterina Wagner, "Russian Art Focus", 14 issue, December, 2020
Film. In the Footsteps of Ghosts, Geraint Rhys Whittaker, "Wales Arts Review", February, 23, 2020
From Wales to Dzerzhinsk 'In the Footsteps of Ghosts. Geraint Rhys' award-winning film about the artist Pavel Otdelnov, Michele A. Berdy, "The Moscow Times", February, 22, 2020
Artist profile: Pavel Otdelnov, Santanu Borah, "Asian Curator", February, 15, 2020
Pavel Otdelnov: Future Ruins, Kate de Pury, "Russian Art Focus", 14 issue, January, 2020
See Death and Life in Dzerzhinsk, Aaron James Wedland, "The Moscow Times", February 18, 2019
The Last of the Soviet Artists: Who are they?, Victoria Lomasko lection in the Wende Museum, March, 23, 2019
Artist probes Russia's toxic legacy through family history, Kate de Pury, Associated Press Agency, February 20, 2019
the article was edited more than 300 editions all over the world, including:
ABC News / American Press / Associated Press / Business Insider / Chicago Tribune / Daily Herald / Fox News / Greenwich Time / Hartford Courant / Houston Chronicle / Independent Record / National Post / Newsday / Newser / Russian Insight / Star Tribune / Sun Herald / Taiwan News / The Buzz / Times Colonist / The Daily Mail / The Eagle / The Hour / The Intelligencer / The Mainchi / The New York Times / The News & Advance / The News & Observer / The Post Star / The Washington Post / The Washington Times / U.S. News / Yahoo News
The Collapse of Communism, Whanganui Chronicle, March, 8, 2019
Thinking big. Five promising young artists whose large-scale paintings make a big splash, "Russian Art Focus", 1 issue, November, 2018
NEMOSKVA International Travelling Symposium NCCA and ROSIZO by Andrey Shental, Flash Art
Ural Biennal 2017: Literacy for the New Age by Robert Schulte, SPIKE Art Magazine, October, 3, 2017
Deserts: 2002-2017, Moscow Mayor official website, March, 3, 2017
Pavel Otdelnov, poete du nulle part (French), Rusina Shikhatova, "Le courrier de Russie", №311, september — october 2016
Grim post-Soviet landscapes of Moscow's residential districts, Daria Donina, "Russia Beyond the Headlines", January, 4, 2015
Biennale of young art opens in Moscow, The Calvert Journal, June, 25, 2014
Alles, was ich will, ist dass der Krieg aufhröt! (German), Larissa Mass, "Moskauer Deutche Zeitung", 2014
Main culture events of the week, Ekathimerini (Greek), February, 24, 2019
Fragments Of The Past": The Superb Contemporary Industrial Paintings By Pavel Otdelnov, designyoutrust, 2019
Press-release of the Pavel Otdelnov exhibition "Promzona", Moscow Museum of Modern Art
Newsmakers of the month, Ekaterina Wagner, "Russian Art Focus", February 2019
Moodboard. Pavel Otdelnov "Promzona", Dialogue of Arts Magazine, №1, 2019
Pavel Otdelnov. Horizontal motion. Ground Magazine, 2018
Ural Biennal 2017: Literacy for the New Age, An interview with curator João Ribas, Robert Schulte, SPIKE Art Magazine, October, 3, 2017
Mall, Triumph gallery, 2015. Press release on the Triumph gallery website
Russia. Realism. XXI century, The State Russian Museum
Inner Degunino, MMOMA, 2014
Russian Investment Art Rating 49art
The best russian contemporary artists by "Arteex"
A Russian artist glimpses history in the making by exploring the country’s ugly side – from toxic industrial wastelands to city landfills. Seen from high above, a massive, sculpted ziggurat rises out of the dense pine forest that stretches to the horizon. At first glance, clean, architectural lines in this work ‘Landfill Alexandrov’ by Russian artist Pavel Otdelnov, almost mask the fact that the towering mass is simply tonnes of garbage, packed into a landfill site. But the other painting in his exhibit for this year’s Moscow Biennale zooms in on the same landfill and here it’s an uncompromising, hyper-real view, showing a cluster of dump trucks lost in a vast sea of rubbish. In ‘Landfill Timokhovo’ flecks of coloured plastic give way to an unnatural grey-on-grey horizon of flattened garbage that is entirely man-made. It’s a chilling vision, but one that reflects one of the most hotly-debated issues in Russia today: how to dispose of the waste generated by its new consumer society. Otdelnov joins that debate in his latest work. He filmed an investigation into where his own trash went after he threw it away, producing an 18-minute video ‘The Trash Trip’, which plays alongside his paintings in the new wing of Moscow’s State Tretyakov Gallery, as part of the current Biennale. The artist attached GPS satellite trackers to his garbage; one was stuffed inside an old bread roll, another encased in bubble wrap and a third placed in a discarded soap box. Otdelnov charts their progress with cool detachment. He narrates in matter-of fact style as we see the flashing GPS signal travel from his courtyard trash container to the waste plant where workers sort rubbish by hand (selecting only about 10 percent for recycling) and finally to the landfill in a forest over 200 km from Moscow. It’s a personal story, but one Otdelnov scales up with devastating effect. “As an ordinary person, a citizen, I live here in Russia and I do this each day,” Otdelnov told Russian Art Focus. “Near me, there are a million people, doing exactly the same thing without really thinking about it.” Following local protests in 2018 against the noxious effects of waste sites around outer Moscow, city authorities began transporting trash further afield to neighbouring regions and even as far as the Archangelsk one in Northwest Russia. When residents of Shiyes, a village in a region located over 1,100 km from Moscow, discovered plans to locate a new landfill on their doorstep, they set up a protest camp to stop construction of the facility, which is due to process 500,000 tonnes of the capital’s waste each year. Local officials, eager to fulfil orders from the capital, called in security groups and there were sporadic clashes with local activists as plans for the dump went ahead. It’s a sensitive topic for the Kremlin as the strategy of exporting rubbish seems also to have exported protests to these new locations. The plight of Shiyes has struck a chord with ordinary Russians and thousands of people across the northwest joined protests this summer. “Of course, it’s awful and I completely sympathise with those people who are protesting against this landfill site,” Otdelnov said. He watched intently during Russian President Vladimir Putin’s annual call-in this year, expecting a response to the Shiyes garbage protests, but none came. “He avoided it because it’s not a popular subject,” Otdelnov said. “Besides, I think he supports building a landfill in Shiyes. That’s why he didn’t talk about it.” Reflecting on past political power is familiar territory for Otdelnov, whose haunting landscapes often reflect the breakup of the Soviet Empire and Russia’s search for a new social and economic path. But this is the first time he has made an artistic intervention into a live political controversy. In Russia, this carries a degree of risk. |
Otdelnov says this step into “social consciousness” was important for his development as an artist. Kate de Pury, "Pavel Otdelnov: Future Ruins", "Russian Art Focus" #14, January 2020 |
The prevailing topic of the artist’s works is urban environment of industrial outskirts and the person’s experience of being in this area. Non-sites depicted by him are the part of his artistic- research project. The author’s strategy can be described by M. McLuhan‘s words: "Art is not to be the vault of impressions, but to explore the surrounding, otherwise it will stay invisible". In his works we can see industrial areas, town outskirts with standard buildings, dullness and hopelessness of which are diluted by alien patches of ridiculous in their inappropriate brightness "colorful sheds" — supermarkets, countless clones of town buildings of 2000-s. In shuttle movement from nowhere to nowhere, setting the tempo-rhythm of our daily routine, these non-sites always stay on the periphery of our consideration. «Taste is the scare of life» (M. Ugarov). In fact, the developed aesthetic feeling, which makes us look away squeamishly from anything what does not comply with it, restricts us. |
The more it is developed, the narrower is the spot, which seems to be a reality for us. This psychological mechanism works when we don’t notice daily occurrence, which is not in congruence with our likes as our unseeing glance glide typical depressing environment of the town outskirts. Our aesthetic feeling is formed by existing discourses — such optics always falls behind. It is impossible to catch the image of present with the help of yesterday’s cognitive instruments. Present finds out to be practically invisible. That’s why Pavel changes the optics and tries to observe present from the future: to imagine what a person would see in our deserted industrial landscapes , who has different cultural prisms, enabling him to have a different look at non-sites: interested, accepting, forgiving, sweet, seeing fragility and temporariness of today’s urban monsters. As the artist says, they can fall apart into pixels and vanish. Svetlana Polyakova, "Non-Sites in Art and Posthuman World", "Dialogue of Arts", #4. 2017 |
Interview in the Newspaper"Le courrier de Russie", (French), №311, september – october 2016. Click to enlarge
Litography from the "Industrial project", Magazine "Idantutkimus" (Finnish), 02, 2015
The album "Ark" of the KernHerbst group with the artwork "Ark". 2014
Listen