Maria Kapajeva

Using a multidisciplinary approach, including archival elements alongside her own images and installations, this project considers the history of the community surrounding a textile mill in Narva, Estonia, now closed, where members of the artist's family once worked. Kapajeva spent her childhood at the mill, drawing patterns and dreaming about becoming a fabric designer like her mother. The story of this one small community is set in the larger context of post-industrial cities worldwide as the loss of their former roles leave them seeking new identities. Drawing on aspects of her mother’s work, her own unrealised childhood dreams and the failed ambition of industrial collectivisation, Kapajeva underlines the complex relationship between personal and public memory that together form our historical narratives. By including a range of different voices and approaches, she indicates that these histories can never be straightforward, but are shaped by multiple, often conflicting forces.

This work has started with a box of negatives I found at my parents’ house a few years ago. There were about 200 processed and unprocessed films, shot by my father. I excavated their contents, delving deeper into the lost images of my father’s life, to create my own stories by using these photographs he took before his marriage to my mother and my birth. I let myself enter into the world of a young man I never knew, and find connections in what possibly cannot be connected with the help of Italo Calvino’s words from his novel 'If on a winter’s night a traveller'. In 2018 the book is published by Kaunas Photography Gallery and it was shortlisted for Aperture First Photobook Award.

Every time I exhibit this work, I create a new narrative especially for the venue and only for one-time display. Sometimes, I make it as an interactive work by inviting people to contribute and create their own stories from the images shot by my father and quotes from Calvino’s novel.

"But I will tell you also what I do not fear. I do not fear to be alone or to be spurned for another or to leave whatever I have to leave. And I am not afraid to make a mistake, even a great mistake, a lifelong mistake, and perhaps as long as eternity too". (from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce, 1916)

I grew up in a culture where women were declared equal to men. This, however, applied to their jobs not to domestic duties, which remained exclusively the obligation of women. They hardly ever got to the top management positions but instead aimed to get happily married and dedicate themselves to the families. When photography came into my life, I began to realize that the myriad of possibilities and perspectives that it afforded were much more interesting than any dream of ‘marrying a prince’. With my move to the UK, I was lucky to meet women who shared my thoughts, were passionate about their careers, and wanted a freedom of choice in what they would aim in their lives. Most of these women have moved to a new country, as I have, not to get married, but to realize their own potential in whatever they do: write, draw, paint, photograph or invent. Working in collaboration with them, I try to find the ways to photograph each of them as a unique and strong personality in her own working environment. These women are my peers and represent a new generation of impassioned young intellectuals who are not afraid to undertake risks and break the rules.

The series is a selection of vernacular photographs which were found on the Internet and digitally manipulated afterwards. The final collages demonstrate a collision of two cultures: Russian women in their domestic interiors in the poses they borrow from Western mass media as an exemplification of female sexuality. The series looks at assimilation and possible integration of cultures of post-Soviet territories with the Western values and how these processes reflect in women’s role in the society. The series contains of 20 images.

Quilt is stitched with a pattern called Double Wedding Rings. The pattern was traditionally used for a trousseau quilt made by bride’s female relatives. The used photographs were found on the matrimonial websites specially created for Russian women to find a Western husband. The images for the quilt are carefully selected from the ones which were shown on these websites as ‘the best samples’ of how women should be photographed for the best matchmaking. This work is continuation of my artistic investigation on women’s role in cross-cultural marriage and fantasies the Russian women as well as Western men have about the women's’ role in it. I am interested to question the relevance of traditions and old values nowadays taking into consideration the new opportunities the globalization can offer.

Quilt 170x170cm, unique piece