Refractions from the Margin

Focus Art NGO, Medialab 2024–2025 Educational Program Graduation Exhibition

In a post-Soviet society shaped by intensifying social polarization and consumerist influence, the visual over-saturation of urban spaces and daily life—driven by a tendency toward spectacular urbanism—inevitably produces visual noise that obstructs the articulation of alternative meanings.

To exist on the margins of such a society is as much a consequence of exile or renunciation as it is an advantage: a vantage point from which to reflect on the whole at a certain distance, to glimpse that which remains nearly imperceptible from within.

From this marginal layer arises—first and foremost—a commitment to deconstruction: a study of what remains unseen and an unveiling of power structures. This is the gaze from the margin. The exhibition exposes the fallout of chaotic developments driven by commercialization (Little People), brings forward ways of street expressions excluded from official discourse (What Do Walls “Say”?), questions prevailing perceptions of women’s roles (You Define Me), interrogates dominant artistic forms (Photo Series), and explores mental health and society’s treatment of it (The Gates of Mental Health).

Yet the most radical gesture—rare even within marginal circles—is the visual medium’s negation of itself. Through the random merging of photographs from different cities, which generates interpretive dissonance (Here, There, Elsewhere), and the extraction of sequential images from linear temporality, disrupting conventional modes of apprehension (Movement in 41 Frames), these works reflect from the margin—yet operate with a universal, transgressing force.

Participating artists