February 21 — 23, from 12 to 5 pm
A.P.T. Gallery, 6 Creekside, Harold Wharf, Deptford, London, SE8 4SA (View on Google Maps)
Private View: Thursday, February 20, 6 — 8 pm
Pavel Otdelnov’s latest exhibition, A Child in Time, extends the inquiry of his acclaimed Hometown project, offering a personal exploration of Soviet childhood in the 1980s.
Otdelnov came to adolescence in the Perestroika era, a malleable time of contested freedoms and passionate debate. Yet this was also an era of acute instability. There were chastening queues for rationed bread, crises gripped the nation, and for children like Otdelnov, the threat of nuclear war was a pervasive source of anxiety. Civil defence lessons vividly depicted catastrophic scenarios, and fears of annihilation were compounded in 1986 by the Chernobyl disaster. A Child in Time echoes the anxieties and dreams of this period, that shaped the identity of a generation often referred to as “the last Soviet pioneers.”
One strand in A Child in Time is Otdelnov’s reimagining of his Soviet school primer, where each letter of the alphabet carried a symbolic weight, subtly embedding Soviet ideals into the fabric of a child’s perception and language. This book made the rhetoric of propaganda feel as natural and familiar as the ordinary words of everyday life. Otdelnov’s Primer replaces the Soviet pictures with illustrations of his creative imaginings and angst. Primer is both a lens for understanding how ideology permeates early learning and a means of confronting the lasting imprints of this indoctrination.
In Television, another central theme of the project, Otdelnov interrogates how this medium affected him and shaped the cultural and emotional heft of the time. A programme like Good Night, Little Ones, with its charming animated theme, offered moments of innocence. However, this was invariably followed by the nightly news programme Vremya (Time), which filled households with a quiet sense of unease. There were prime-time broadcasts of psychics and hypnotists like Anatoly Kashpirovsky, a Soviet counterpoint to Billy Graham, who, instead of mesmerising audiences for financial gain, attempted mass hypnosis at the state’s behest.
Otdelnov’s paintings, conceived at this critical juncture in post-Soviet history, investigate the roots of the current disaster and how this indoctrination has shaped contemporary society.
Monument. 2024. Acrylic on canvas. 150x200
Schoolboy. 2023. Acrilic on canvas. 90x122
Dorogie tovarishi. 2024. acrylic on canvas 76x102
Kashpirovsky. 2024. Acrylic on canvas. 45x61
Elephant. 2024. Acrylic on canvas. 45x61
Kindergarten. 2024. acrylic on canvas. 160x210
As part of the exhibition, a screening of Pavel Otdelnov’s film Subjects of Memory will take place on February 23 at 12:30 pm.
This deeply personal film explores the nature of memory by looking at obsolete workers' settlements and the ruins of Soviet industrial plants and examines their toxic legacy.
Admission is free, but registration is required via the link
For further information, please get in touch with Abbie Amey abbie.otdelnovprojects@gmail.com