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<\/a>It was, perhaps, Brodsky who said: a poem becomes art when it breaks free from the roots of a private, personal story. The same is true of photography: it begins to live when viewers encounter in it something that resonates with each of them. Anyone can take a photograph worthy of being printed, and everyone has a story to share.<\/p>\n\n\n
<\/a>The creator of the project, Olga Stalberg, lives in Israel and organizes monthly exhibitions in different cities on different themes. This time, her path led her to London.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cPop-up gallery,\u201d says Olga, \u201cis not about pure art, but rather about community and creative catalysts. At the exhibition we take a step back: we choose a single photograph, we print it. We slow down, we hold a physical artifact in our hands, we tell its story, we listen, and we connect in the breaks.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Throughout the evening, artists spoke about their works, and the images filled with entirely new meanings and narratives. This layering of meanings, perhaps, became one of the most important features of New Beginning.<\/p>\n\n\n Some of the photographs were also interpreted through PASCOL, a vocal improvisation project. Its performers (three of them were present at the show) transform a story \u2014 seen or heard \u2014 into improvised vocal performance, sometimes with words, sometimes without. This time PASCOL sang to the steady pulse of photographs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Among the participants were Valya Korabelnikova, Marie Lourier, Olga Rerbo, Varvara Burtseva, Andy Go, Mikhail Pestryaev, and others.<\/p>\n\n\n On one of Burtseva\u2019s black-and-white works, a tiny girl looks out at the viewer. She wears a delicate flowered dress with heavy rubber boots. A scraped knee, a sharp black bob, a lip caught in her teeth. A tiny hand resting proprietorially on a fence, from under which a goat\u2019s muzzle pokes out. The image tells the story of the beginnings of a small cheese farm in the Pskov region. Its owners \u2014 city people forced to move to the countryside \u2014 decided to trust chance and start over: they bought a dozen Nubian goats and allowed their daughter to live an extraordinary childhood while they built a new life and gained their first customers. This girl is clearly kin to Astrid Lindgren\u2019s heroines, ready at any moment to leap onto a chocolate-brown goat and gallop across the fields. The work is about trust, curiosity, and beginnings.<\/p>\n\n\n Another work shows the neck of a guitar and a face contorted in either a grimace of pain or a smile \u2014 a self-portrait by Mikhail Pestryaev. The photograph marks the beginning of a long-awaited return: for a long time a broken finger kept the photographer from holding his beloved guitar, and finally that moment has come. A plaster on the finger, a heap of sheet music, a spectrum of emotions. Fear, joy, hope \u2014 and love.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Other works include Lena Otvodenko\u2019s rain-drenched Waterloo Station, Anastasia Gorlova\u2019s hot summer courtyard in pink and green \u2014 her personal doorway into summer, like an entrance to a summertime Narnia. A tiny baby swaddled in cloth, photographed in a crib with a homemade camera \u2014 the daughter of Andy Go (now a grown child, present at the exhibition \u2014 a living embodiment of new beginning).<\/p>\n\n\n<\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a>