ORELART PARIS Art Contemporain Russe et International

Arsen Savadov obtained "The Silver Crown", the first price of the International Festival of Photography in Moscow 2003.

UKRAINIA. COAL MINES IN DONBASS. 1500 METERS IN THE UNDERGROUND. To carry out his "hardware report" the artist goes down under unbearable conditions. The settings in metaphorical scenes are carried out with real minors. The mine is presented like the underground culture.

The series of photographs "Donbass", which is a part of the "Deepinsider" project, recreates the disconcerting conditions, which prevail in the coalmines of Ukrainia.
The day-to-day of real minors, which live in this «underground», is disturbed by the irruption of artists, photographers and of some masculine mannequins, dressed with tutus. Choosing the shock of the "hardware" style, the artist emphasizes a metaphorical zone where the Tartar River, Eros and chaos are incorporated.

With its difficult conditions and the elements of permanent risk, which are associated there, the coal mine constitutes the extreme paradigm of the working condition. The Ukrainian minors’ habitat assumes the form of a kind of ghetto resting on the voluntary participation in which the minors set up a hermetically partitioned group in the society, having its own social codes and its distinct ethical system. The mine offers a strange version of the "culture of the catacombs" and is presented at the same time in the form of a place reserved for the male sex, a "club for men only", where the body is subjected to an exhausting discipline.

Similar sites provided the framework of a conventional type of documentary photography, where the artists intervene in places considered in theory as inaccessible, underlining the high degree of bravery and manipulative skill of the photographer, who penetrates dangerous places and restrictive situations. The strategy of our artist is comparable with that of those which, according to the American artist Martha Rosler, "such as the astronaut, shows us places in which one would never have hoped to be: photographs of war, photographs of shantytowns, images of worships and subcultures, photographs of deviating, the poor living in other countries... "

The exploration of the artist aims the identity of two marginal groups: contemporary artists forming the most radical cultural fraction within the Ukrainian society, and minors, who are the social group more focused in this society. Confusion and disturbance emerge, in resultant of the confrontation between the heterosexuality associated by convention to this type of universe and the intervention of artists simulating a stereotyped homosexuality.

Their strategy of the semantics’ deterioration of the mass media expresses in a certain direction an intented objective of cultural aggression. The artists changed the methodology of appearance into ideology of the presence. They tried to renew a cultural space functioning for itself, while returning its incapacity to him to move with the society. This project is consciously deprived of traditional reflection on oneself, which produces the world of the culture and presented like a very succeeded show from the mass culture kind.

It gives an operational definition of the position of total outsider in the contemporary culture.