Margo Ovcharenko, Temirtas Iskakov and their Chisinau fountains zine.

The Ebb is a zine that invites the viewer to visit abandoned Chișinău fountains and experience the drought both actual and metaphorical. It’s a collaborative work which consists of Margo Ovcharenko’s photographs and the interviews and collages presented by Temirtas Iskakov. This body of work is an ode to the city which has troubled soviet past and deals with current issues of water scarcity. Chișinău moves forward by letting soviet relics fall into decay and no longer facilitates the facade of abundance which communist ideology had provided, developing the new narratives in its place. But in doing it slowly the city allows this process to be grasped in images and texts. This passage of time is also visible in stories from Chișinău residents in which traditions change and the new ones take place. 

Margo Ovcharenko is a Kyiv based artist working with photography. Her projects’ main focus for the past ten years has been empowerment through femininity. She explores such topics as body under pressure in sports, queerness and complexity of emotional interaction. She often photographs women in nude but does so in working together with her subjects to subvert and question objectification of female bodies. Portraiture for her takes on powerful political meaning when used against the state propaganda by giving visibility to her subjects and their issues. In 2011 she completed a series titled Furious like a child which examined her experience with male gaze while doing rhythmic gymnastics as a child and a teenager in Russia. The series deals with objectification, young woman’s body image and femininity as a performance. In 2016 she finished working on her series Country of Women and shortly after published a zine which was shortlisted as a part of the Aperture Paris Photo first photobook award. The series portraits faces and shows bodies of queer women Margo met while traveling in Eastern Europe. In this work she uses posing as a tool to express complexity of queer body image, identity and sex appeal. In her latest series Overtime she expands her interests by portraying a tight community of a women soccer team. For four years she followed the team's daily life, capturing their struggles and their relationships. Her visual approach has changed by incorporation of images of the neighborhood to set up a socio-economical context for her subjects as well as taking on the metaphorical meaning for players’ emotions. Throughout her project she strives to show duality that comes with being a female soccer player such as being in a sisterhood and but also being isolated as a professional athlete; having extremely powerful bodies that can easily injure; being on top in their field but also underpaid and underappreciated by general public. And of course the femininity of their appearance that freely traverses into masculinity and back.

Temirtas Iskakov is an architect and cultural activist from Astana, Kazakhstan. He is the founder of Fading.TSE urban research platform built around the topics of architectural heritage and collective memory. Temirtas explores urban history, material culture, visual identity of Kazakhstani cities and focuses on community building through visual storytelling, social media documentary and advocacy campaigns.

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Foto Margo Ovcharenko, Temirtas Iskakov