Artist
Sasha Chaika
Sasha Chaika (b. 1994) is an artist currently living in St. Petersburg. He graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts and Sciences at the State University in 2017 and today works as an art and fashion freelance photographer, art-director, film- and music-maker.
Sasha participated in the 5th Moscow International Biennial for Young Art in MMoMA, previous year took a part of “Somewheres & Anywheres: Young Photography from Eastern Europe” exhibition in Berlin gallery EEP and join BERLIN PHOTO WEEK.
His short film “Swallowed by the Routine” was selected for the Fashion Film Awards 2019 by SHOWstudio X HARRODS and was shown in London last October.
The main themes explored by Sasha now are the struggle with the language, because words controls us and reduces our worldview; queer theory, that means infinite pluralism of identities, meanings without hierarchy, ever-changing flexible self-definition; and criticism/decentration of the concept of truth.
This three ideas are really close to each other like the liberation from automatisms, habits and the aspiration to independent, affective perception and action.
Russian Shame
RUSSIAN SHAME
/Identity, which we should be proud of/
When between the achievement of an ideal and reality opportunities extends an abyss of impossibility, a void, a person overcomes this gap in roundabout, crooked way, thereby gaining his own identity. Russian shame is about creating identity through the personal experience, even if it’s trying to copy something initially.
The possibility of matching the ideals only in a distorted form become the moment of birth of something sincere - the (un)ideal, (un)completed and (un)defined - something different from the concept of the ideal, that poses the problem of the conventionality of this concept itself. The time has come for carnival, re-designation (re-labeling), flipping.
I am under pressure. All around try to cause shame in me for imperfection, my authenticity, my crooked path is taken as underdeveloped. High culture is trying to smooth out the sharp corners of unconscious frivolity, putting everything neatly on the shelves, but “the Russian kid can not be hidden behind wide pants”. This is a translation of Russian aphorism, which means that savagery and liveliness will never leave a Russian person, even if he wears a neat, ironed suit.
Monumental and dead ideal collapsing under the pressure of the dirt, of something honest and rectilinear living, emotional. Naivety and longing, decline and filth, mistakes and the inability to achieve the ideals allow me to live and feel authentically in Russian.
“Russian Shame” implies a rejection of existence in the position of the victim and marginalization. In a situation of impossibility of beautiful Apollonian monumentality, which imposed from without, the Russian man exists in the exalted Dionysian Chaos. Life is born in a flaw and mistakes.