Tkachenko Danila

In 2014 he graduated from the Rodchenko Moscow School of Photography. In the same year he became the winner of the World Press Photo. Received a number of international awards including European Publishers Award For Photography, Burn Magazine grant, and included in the Foam Talents.
His recent projects published by BBC Culture, The Guardian, IMA Magazine, GUP Magazine, British Journal of Photography and others.

Mannequins

The project addresses the problems of recollection and remembrance of political terror in the former Soviet Union.

I would try to find the sites of former concentration camps of the GULAG system and reach them in order to establish installations there consisting of mannequins covered with black cloth. As a rule, these places are hard-to-reach and are not marked on maps.

The suicidal nature of the Soviet repressions hampers the functioning of the mechanisms that tend to be used to help people survive a disaster: learn what happened; find and punish the guilty; establish memorials at the sites of the crimes.

Other than its scale, only one thing is known about this Soviet catastrophe – the extent of the uncertainty. The precise number of GULAG victims cannot be established: existing estimates range from 5 million to 30 million. Most of the information remains classified by the state, there is no complete list of the victims and executioners, and there are not enough museums and memorials which could frame an understanding of these events for future generations.

Russia is a country where millions remain unburied. This incompleteness is one of the reasons why the recent past continues to haunt Russian politics and cultures, divide society and place restrictions on political choice. The past returns in the form of fear of what the future holds and an apprehensiveness that history might repeat itself, in the process laying waste to the present.