Suffocations.
OLGA KOROVINA
CURATED BY LAURA JIMÉNEZ IZQUIERDO
Who would you say has been the personality of the year? In my opinion the same person than the personality of 2016. That great individual who the Simpsons seemed to predict would win the US Elections someday. And there is no day that he is not captured staring at us from the big news headlines.
Just a few weeks after his inauguration in the White House, we could read the Presidential Orders he had approved:
Reinforcement of Illegal Immigration control and reduction of the legal one. Rejection of Muslim refugees and immigrants. Withdrawal from Transpacific Partnership. Approval of the old and polemic Keystone XL oil pipeline. “Obamacare” reduction. Revival of the “Mexico City Policy” concerning abortion. A more and more suspicious coordination and communication with Russia… And a long etcetera which “luckily” has not been supported and approved in its entirety.
What do you think about this? How do you feel? How do I feel? How do we feel?
That was the question that the photographer Olga Korovina asked herself and her models.
“I am suffocating”.
“I cannot breath”.
“The situation is strangling me”.
Based on this frustration and breathless feeling, Korovina decided to start a project where she would depict the community who surrounds her and how they feel.
From a very defined and sharp portrait photography where she captures her models in a centered bust shot over a blue background between the indigo and the sky-blue, the artist depicts without any character´s sign or feature all their sorrow. Drooping shoulders of grief, nudity of honesty and vulnerability, and design bags with attractive colors which not only hide entirely their faces, but also enclose their necks carefully yet perilously, hampering their breathing.
With an intense color spectrum close to the color bursts of David Lachapelle, Olga uses photography as one of the most loyal testimonies of our reality to create solid and collective portraits. Completely veiled portraits like the Magritte´s “lovers”. The models face up to you. They don´t say anything and they say everything. They ask for help through the plastic and fabric. Help because they feel strangled by a government which oppresses them; by a capitalism which seems to force them to define their own interests and desires; by a debt to which they cannot see the end; by a lack of general empathy; by an exhausted hope.
After living during some months in the US, I was able to live the last weeks of the electoral campaign, the elections, the result, the red brightness in the Empire State (the same red as the first photography of Korovina’s show) and the cloudy and glum next morning where you could breathe sadness. I could see how people were suffocating little by little in New York, and all over the world.
I think everyone was surprised with the election results. We waited worried, and a bit strangled, to know what was going to happen and if that individual would get to do all that he had said. We are still waiting with a bag over our necks, closing little by little.
Again, we blame again the problem on the lack of education and culture. Here is where art has to enter.
It is in this type of critical situation where culture has to enter to fight, to give awareness, to teach. To complain and to reclaim a world of liberty and equality.
All of this is not just a discourse talking about the artist’s closest circle and political situation. This is a collective portrait of feelings. An international portrait of the lack of air in every political, economic and social situation.
We want to change whatever we can. We do not want to become suffocated, for anyone to become suffocated. We want everyone to breathe the same air together. Without bags, walls, barriers, without racism and exclusions.
Olga decides with this and other projects to reclaim what is ours. And with this I mean our air, our world, our rights, our liberty. Our liberty of expression and living. Our breathing.
Laura Jiménez Izquierdo
Bio
Olga Korovina is a photographer based in Brooklyn, New York. She has a double Bachelor degree in Mathematics (BS) and Photography (BFA) by the City University of New York – College of Staten Island.
Apart of her personal and freelance work as independent photographer. Experienced Social Media Manager with a demonstrated history of working in the photography industry. She has worked as Social Media Manager for Chuckies Brooklyn Designer Shoes, Ostrich & Co and also as Communications Intern for the International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP) of New York.