Private Moon Project By Leonid Tishkov And Boris Bendikov

Ironically, as a result of this incident, Tishkov’s work gained critical esteem and recognition in certain areas of publishing. Beginning from this somewhat vicarious notoriety, his cartoon work gradually developed and grew into the elaborate allegorical narratives for which he is recognised today. These narratives typically play out in a ‘Tishkovian’ dreamscape, which occupies a space somewhere between the subconscious and lived reality. He describes his work as divided into three parts, The Lower World, exploring the underlying layers of the human psyche, The Middle World, the realm of childhood memory and his own Ural Mountains upbringing and The Upper World, focusing on metaphysics and utopia’s. Although the ‘Private Moon’ project literally and conceptually inhabits The Upper World, elements of the other two are extant. Affirming the ethereal aesthetic qualities of the Tishkov authored magical moon myth images, the Private Moon story has its origins in the Nordic influenced fairytales of the Urals (Moomintroll would be at home). The Private Moon is a suite of photographs articulating a visual poem, telling of a man who met the moon and stayed with her for the rest of his life after seeing her fall from the sky. Each photograph is a poetic tale chronicling the journey of the man, who wearing his dead fathers cloths entered into and then came back out from the underworld, using only the moon to light his path.
Boris Bendikov is a perfect collaborator for Leonid on Private Moon, expert in the art of fantasy creation; Bendikov operates as a fashion photographer and an art photographer in his own right. The images are made on large format camera and Tishkov insists on no Photoshop trickery. The fantastic lunar tableau is represented with the meticulous veracity of high modernist documentary photographic method.
Curator Marcus Williams met Leonid Tishkov in his Moscow studio in 2005 and again in 2007. In 2009 he included a suite of silk-screen prints from Leonid’s best known allegorical narrative; ‘The Dabloids’ into his survey exhibition of contemporary Russian art at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery.