In White Sea Colours, Mikhail Tolmachev explores three photo albums depicting life at the Solovetsky Islands special camp in the 1920s and 1930s. The first album was presented to the politician Sergei Kirov, the second to the writer Maxim Gorky, the third found its way from a family archive to the Moscow GULAG History Museum.

Photographs are inextricable from the circumstances of their creation, and these circumstances, in turn, exert an influence on how photographs are perceived. The social and cultural contexts of the photographs contained in the Solovetsky albums should not be left without detailed exploration. Researching and popularising these images might enhance the work of collective memory. – Mikhail Tolmachev, excerpt from “White Sea Colours”

Mikhail Tolmachev is a Russian visual artist who works with sound installations, videos, photographs, and spatial interventions. In his practice, he looks into the constantly evolving status of a document and politically mediated construction of truth and reality. He collaborates with writers, historians, and artists to explore representation fractures and re-think the conventions of spectatorship.