Selected by David Claerbout, artist, Antwerp
David Claerbout You moved from Belarus ten years ago. Here in Belgium, you’re a photographer, but you trained as a mathematician. Why did you move from mathematics to photography?
Alexey Shlyk My grandfather was a famous Soviet biologist, my father is a mathematician, but from a young age I wanted to escape this very rational way of thinking and being.
For me, back then, photography was black and white, darkroom photography. I started with a 35mm camera, doing reportage for magazines when I was fifteen years old. And I soon realised that I liked to construct images, so it was a decision to go into a studio and work with objects. The slow process of construction of an image and the joy of making a print from large film is incredible. Making a one-to-one scale image, it’s beautiful.
DC Is there something that is a recurring theme, a motive in your work?
AS I always need to make things myself, so manual labour is an important part of the work for me – to construct objects which would exist only as a subject for the camera and the image, and would never be shown by themselves. When I moved to Belgium, I made the series The Appleseed Necklace (2016–18). That was a project about my memories of people making things, about do-it-yourself culture. The series reconstructs my memories through photography; the images are based on events and things I’ve seen or heard in the past.
DC The Potato Picker (2016) is one of those images that somehow stands out, though it’s not immediately clear why.
AS It’s one that highlights for me the ambiguity in photography. A classmate was sent to collect potatoes in the field, picking them up as the tractor digs them out. But it’s dusty, so the driver made him some goggles from a plastic bottle. Imagining standing in the field in the late summer all covered in dirt, in these ingenious glasses, I made this image in the studio, mimicking every part of it. But nothing in the image is what it is. The dirt is not dirt, the glasses are not glasses, the sky is not a sky. The person is still a person – however, he’s not redheaded.
DC I wanted to ask you about being part of a diaspora. How important is that in work and in daily life?
AS I still have a foot in there, and I understand the mentality of people in Belarus, Russia, ex-Soviet people, but I’m also European. But that allows me to see the situation in general, I see this dystopian reality we now live in. It’s a time of war, just unimaginable. And I think it becomes a reason to make work, which is the opposite of what’s going on. So it’s utopian themes that interest me, to get away from this depressing reality.
DC Your exhibition Backspace, in Antwerp in 2022, brought these themes together.
AS Yes, from 2017 to about two years ago I was collaborating with the artist Ben Van den Berghe on various projects. Together with Ben and architect York Bing Oh we developed a modular maquette system, one I still use now. Our interest was in the photographic space, and in making photographic installations. Largescale wallpaper and framed photographs on top create a layered temporality and confuse the viewer’s perception of reality. Within the exhibition, space, image and architectural reality start to blur.
The Ukraine war had just started and I thought that, emotionally, I wouldn’t be able to do a show. But it turned out to be a personal way of dealing with the ongoing war. So in the main space of Backspace we created a very utopian, colourful space resembling an architectural model, and we put the war behind the wall: every ten minutes you could see a video projection there, if you crawled through a narrow opening into to the ‘backspace’ – found footage of Russian artillery firing over delicate birch trees that shiver in the light of the rockets. The work was a dialogue between the playful space dominated by architectural models in the foreground and the disturbing reality spilling inside with the flashes and sounds of the rocket launches.
DC Utopian and dystopian are balanced then. Colour is one of the first things to stand out in your work because the image’s motive is elusive, meagre and diffuse. Your works are the opposite of anything that could be read as propagandistic.
AS Colour has been super important in the more recent works. Day and Night (2023), with its multiple openings, deals with the perception of the space and depth within the image. It’s of course influenced a lot by Belgian surrealists. Although it looks rather naive, it is also an optical work, where the red markers shift your eyes across the space of the image, changing your focus.
DC Political histories are more present in your most recent show, GOO, but still in a very mediated way. That show included the photograph Mausoleum (2024).
AS GOO reflects on the emotional state that propaganda in the media of Belarus and Russia was driving me into. Mausoleum is a heavily postproduced image, made from a 1.5m wide maquette of Lenin’s Mausoleum in Moscow, out of which is pouring red wax. It has another title: ‘A lie told often enough, becomes the truth’. It’s a quote that is often attributed to Lenin, but this is also not true. There was some madness in that installation; people would walk into a messy image, that spread on the floor, covering all walls and crackling under your feet. I had a desire to make a space that was seductive but unpleasant to be in, that you would want to leave. I was trying to get through this feeling of disgust that I had of propaganda.
DC You’re handling these political remnants of the Soviet Union, among others, but in a very indirect way.
AS I’m trying to do work that represents my emotional state, and for me it’s necessary work for myself to understand where I am, to overcome that situation. I want to express not the facts, not the information, but the feeling that I have, of how propaganda works for me; it’s attractive, but it’s all fake.
DC That brings me to another issue that is very striking in the images that you make – a sort of ‘missed encounter’ with materiality. I would describe it as if you were looking for very concrete, touchable, tactile material, but you necessarily miss it. Starting from The Potato Picker through to this highly collaged Mausoleum, in which you cannot tell what size it is or what it wants to be. It’s made out of bits and pieces, a ruin somehow, as if you came from a war zone. You collect them together and you start again.
AS It’s my desire to see it in ruin, finally, to get rid of that history and to finally see all of that wax leaking out on the streets and just disappearing down the drain.
Alexey Shlyk is a Belarusian photographer living and working in Antwerp. He graduated in Mathematics from the Belarus State University in 2008 before obtaining an MA in photography at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Antwerp, in 2018 and an MA in Research in Art and Design at Sint Lucas Antwerpen in 2019. He was a laureate of the Carte Blanche programme at Paris Photo in 2017 and won the Prijs Roger De Conynck in 2018.
