At XL Gallery in Moscow, Sergey Sapozhnikov’s solo exhibition ‘10–26’ brings together photographs taken more than a decade ago but only now printed and exhibited. Yet it is the unexpected emptiness of the gallery, rather than the images themselves, that becomes the exhibition’s most compelling feature, opening up questions of memory, forgetting and an elusive sense of unease.

Sergey Sapozhnikov (b. 1984), one of Russia’s most commercially successful and sought-after contemporary artists, is the subject of ‘10–26’, a solo exhibition at XL Gallery in Moscow. His work regularly features in group exhibitions organised by leading curators, including Viktor Misiano, whose exhibition ‘It Happened to Me’ at the Winzavod Centre for Contemporary Art included Sapozhnikov last year. Major institutions have also embraced his work, giving him considerable freedom to realise ambitious projects. In 2023, for example, GES-2 House of Culture presented ‘House and Garden’, an exhibition in which Sapozhnikov reflected on his domestic life during the Covid lockdown. The project was striking for its elaborate exhibition design, a catalogue resembling a glossy magazine, an abundance of imagery and other unmistakable signs of a substantial budget.

And yet, for all this, the first thing that strikes the visitor on entering XL Gallery is the unexpected sparseness of the display. In the vast exhibition hall, only relatively small sections of two opposing walls are occupied by large-format photographs from a single series, accompanied by what might be described as a backdrop of images and fragments from other series. Some distance away stands a small scaffolding tower, serving as an improvised support for the spotlights illuminating the works. Nearby hangs a lengthy text in which Sapozhnikov recounts the circumstances in which the photographs were created, in a remarkably straightforward manner, without theoretical embellishment or stylistic pretension.

In brief, the artist recalls how his interests shifted from graffiti to photography, then cinema and eventually art; how these practices gradually overlapped and intertwined; and how, between 2010 and 2012, he discovered three locations, two in his hometown of Rostov-on-Don, Russia, and one in Tbilisi, Georgia. There, he photographed vegetation growing beside a sewer outlet, the cab of a lorry at a rubbish dump and an installation assembled from whatever materials were at hand. The origins of the ‘10–26’ project may seem rather complex, but the simplicity of the exhibition itself soon renders these intricacies secondary.

The spatial arrangement, with its abundance of seemingly deliberate emptiness (there is clearly no budget here comparable to that of GES-2), works to the exhibition’s advantage. It is as though Sapozhnikov is struggling to recall a distant past, making a conscious effort to retrieve something from memory, and succeeding, at least in part. This is significant, given that the photographs on display have waited more than 12 to 14 years to be printed and exhibited. But time takes its toll. What remains are vivid images and verbal accounts of events which, for all their detail, can only convey so much. The substance of what happened, everything that surrounded those moments and gave them context, seems to have slipped into oblivion. That oblivion, embodied in the oppressive emptiness of the gallery, becomes the central element of the exhibition. Seen from this perspective, even the artist’s lengthy explanatory text seems intended less to reconstruct the past than to allow him to articulate it fully and finally release it from his memory. To tell and to show, in order to leave it behind.

This is an intriguing point, since the subjects captured in these works conceal no trauma, tragedy or other affliction that demands to be worked through and erased from memory, as popular psychology constantly urges us to do. On the contrary, the stories depicted seem full of possibilities for continuation, expansion and further development, which Sapozhnikov would surely have pursued had chance not intervened. Visually, these subjects are transformed into images that seem plucked from a stream of dreams, hallucinations or simply a social media feed filled with both human creativity and AI slop. Such visions always hold enormous potential. Yet it is precisely here that the artist is forced to bring them to an unexpected halt, producing a far more interesting effect than he might have achieved by accumulating still more constructions, photographs and images.

The collage method has always been central to Sapozhnikov’s practice. On the one hand, he literally cuts and combines photographic images. On the other, he is clearly drawn to the juxtaposition of objects, people and elements within the images themselves, embracing the disorder that such combinations produce. Out of this apparent chaos emerge unexpected forms and accidental compositions, and it is precisely their discovery that lies at the heart of his artistic practice. Sapozhnikov captures these surprising hybrids by presenting viewers with a profusion of images crowded with detail.

At the current exhibition at XL Gallery, such an approach might seem unlikely to succeed, given the extreme economy of the display. The most striking accidental composition, as we have seen, is the central emptiness of the gallery, which in itself can be considered an achievement. But it is not the only unexpected effect produced by the restrained selection of photographs. Arranged across the two walls, the images form something resembling a graph, its peaks and troughs suggesting fluctuations in prices, a heartbeat, falling incomes, seismic activity, shifts in public opinion or any number of other indicators charting significant processes. Suddenly, the display begins to resemble a record of dynamic events unfolding somewhere nearby and, above all, in the present moment. Yet we are explicitly told that these images concern events from long ago. The artist himself, having recounted his experiences and indulged in nostalgia for just long enough, seems ready to leave everything on display firmly in the past.

This paradoxical clash of opposing impressions leads to the final, fundamental question: who is responsible for this unconscious sense of unease? Is it the viewer, projecting their own anxieties onto essentially semi-abstract compositions, or the artist, who, like everyone else (and perhaps more acutely, by virtue of being an artist), acts as an antenna, picking up signals circulating through the surrounding world? Most likely, the process works both ways. But perhaps the most important point is that the catalyst for this heightened sensitivity is precisely the emptiness itself. Without this conspicuous void, which seems to suggest something without ever revealing quite what, none of these sensations might have arisen at all.