Beyond Memory: Soviet Nonconformist Photography and Photo-Related Works of Art

Beyond Memory: Soviet Nonconformist Photography and Photo-Related Works of Art offers an interpretation of various aspects of unofficial photography and photo-related art produced in the Soviet Union over the past forty years. The title refers to photography's powerful ability to bear witness, to aid remembrance, to shape memory, and even to alter beliefs about the past. This exhibition presents to the American public—in many cases for the first time—the work of many important Soviet photographers and artists.

Soviet nonconformist artists made positive use of difficult circumstances. Their photography illustrates their resourcefulness in dodging state censorship and in getting by with very poor materials. Beyond Memory underscores Soviet artists' unusually ironic and inventive uses of photography that presage the medium's prominence today. While many similarities exist between Soviet and Western art photography, Soviet artists' finely honed irony, sense of absurdity, and biting wit remain unsurpassed. Their clever invention of means and meanings was in no way limited to photography; indeed, such ingenuity is characteristic of the nonconformist art movement as a whole, and an examination of photo-related art deepens understanding of the larger Soviet underground art movement.

While Beyond Memory specifically explores late Soviet photography, surprisingly it reveals the universal character, range, and potential of the photographic medium itself. Beyond Memory is doubly focused: one eye on Russian art, and the other on the medium of photography. Exceedingly canny Soviet uses shed light on photography's possibilities. Photography, which has everywhere challenged all aspects of art, culture, and media, is now in turn challenged by digital developments. That photography is a most fluid medium as evidenced by the Dodge Collection and is at the heart of Beyond Memory. 

Curated by Diane Neumaier, Professor of Photography, Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University.