Empty expectations: Ksenia Yurkova plays with our perception in latest photo book
From Empty Expectations (2015) by Ksenia Yurkova
From Empty Expectations (2015) by Ksenia Yurkova
From Empty Expectations (2015) by Ksenia Yurkova
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From Empty Expectations (2015) by Ksenia Yurkova
From Empty Expectations (2015) by Ksenia Yurkova
.jpg)
From Empty Expectations (2015) by Ksenia Yurkova
From Empty Expectations (2015) by Ksenia Yurkova
.jpg)
From Empty Expectations (2015) by Ksenia Yurkova
11 January 2017
Text
Liza Premiyak
As its title suggests, Empty Expectations, the latest photo book by Russian photographer and artist Ksenia Yurkova, challenges what we know about image, narrative, and visual language as a whole.
The publication features straight photography and manipulated images, combined in sequences that are not at first obvious to the eye. As the artist herself describes it, the book’s “visual language develops in a set of links and attitudes, almost like verbal language”.
This is not the first project by the artist closely related to verbal language: for 4 Stairs, Yurkova turned Murmansk’s cityscape into a game of associations, based on interviews she carried out with its residents.
After being nominated for both Kassel Dummy Awards and the Vienna Photo Book Review and featuring in various exhibitions from Beijing to Madrid in 2016, Empty Expectations will be on show at Exhibition Laboratory at The University of the Arts, Helsinki from 17 February until 12 March.