IN THE LAND OF THE CHILDHOOD SUMMERS

A collective exhibition of Laura Arum-Lääts (1984) and Kudres Lääts (1979) invites visitor to take a glimpse look at one small town in Central Siberia, the town which dying away.

The exhibition contains photographs taken both by digital and analogue cameras last summer in Moscow and Prokopyevsk. In these pictures, the story unwinds.

”My childhood summers are filled with the smell of coal and weeds. Together with my sister, we spent summers in my mother’s childhood house in Prokopyevsk, Siberia, where stove was burned, and roads were repaired with coal. The grandfather and other male relatives were miners. We visited our relatives, travelling by tram. To reach the tram stop, we walked through Aerodromnoi settlement, which during the World War II used to be an aerodrome, then crossed the wasteland, where burdock and wowmseed grew. It has still remained without changes. The only thing that the relatives are not miners anymore,” explains Laura the background of this exhibition. “Laura is more local, I am a visitor, who tries to reconcile myself with the peculiarities of Siberia,“ adds Kudres, who  has conquered the beginning and the end of the journey for the sake of this exhibition.

Prokopyevski town is situated in the Central Russia. It was founded in 1918 in a region rich in coal. In the mid-1920s, from the small villages dating back to 18 century, the biggest coal-mining centre in Kuznetski coal basin appeared in the region. Prokopyevsk was a place where coal was mined and cleaned, and miner’s headlamps were also produced.

Laura Arum-Lääts and Kudres Lääts are husband and wife, who work together under a cover name of Ursula Drake. „In the land of childhood summers“ is their first public exhibition. This is the first part of the two-part display, where the photography artists focus on their origins. The sequence of the exhibition will take viewer to the places of Kudres’s childhood in Transnistria, a small unrecognized state between Moldova and Ukraine.

The exhibition is open until February 5.