Kristina Kuzemko

• “Russia’s Daily Routine”
• Tutor: Marge Monko, Paul Kuimet
• Photo series, pigment prints, 5 photographs, 5 texts
• 594 × 841mm

The series “Russia’s Daily Routine” is about Russian media propaganda. I was born in a country where I can’t identify myself with neither Estonian nor Russian cultural space. In my childhood, only Russian media channels were consumed in my surroundings, which tied me culturally to a country that is not my homeland. In recent years, I have witnessed how this country, in its angry form, taints its culture with darkness. 

My father is Ukrainian, my mother is Russian, and I was born in Estonia.

The works are created in two parts: a photo and an accompanying quote. Each photo is inspired by a news story read or heard from a Russian media outlet. Through a staged photo series, I want to draw attention to the absurdity in which ordinary people in Russia have to live. This includes corruption, lack of freedom of speech, poverty, anti-LGBT campaigns, state propaganda, and Putin’s dictatorship without a definite term limit. If you think things can’t get more absurd, there is always something else up the sleeve of the state apparatus  to surprise and make people’s lives even more difficult. Of course, this applies if you yourself don’t work for that apparatus.