Private Moon Project By Leonid Tishkov And Boris Bendikov

Soviet Union born Leonid Tishkov began his professional life as a medical doctor, entering the world of visual art via his boyhood obsession with drawing. In the mid 1970’s Leonid began to contribute cartoon work to magazines in the more western facing Soviet outpost of Estonia, as well as exhibiting there. In 1981 he exhibited in a cartoon competition in which a now forgotten East German artist presented a caricature of Leonid Brezhnev, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Despite the fact that his cartoon was entirely absent of politics, Tishkov was thereafter barred from exhibition halls and the media, merely by virtue of the fact that his work was exhibited next to the offending drawing.
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.