Ksenia Nouril about the book Surveillance. A Typology of Oppression.

Ksenia Nouril about the book.

Valentyn Odnoviun’s Surveillance: A Typology of Oppression presents us with an alternative landscape—one marked by a vast network of prisons in and around the former Soviet Union. This book brings together 45 stunning photographs of spyholes from now-derelict prisons in Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Ukraine, Poland, and Germany. Odnoviun has delicately captured an incredible amount of detail in the scratched, chipped, and patinaed surfaces of the slices of glass pictured in each of the images. Commentary by the artist along with that of scholar Agnė Narušytė and curator Jan Gustav Fiedler bring the series into context, reflecting on the work’s meaning as well as its materiality. Surveillance: A Typology of Oppression is an indispensible tome for anyone interested in contemporary photography and its intersections with twentieth century history, specifically that of oppressive regimes. It is truly a visual testament to the many lives that were directly affected by ideological repression then and still today.  

– Ksenia Nouril, PhD

Jensen Bryan Curator, The Print Center, Philadelphia, USA

In 2018 Ksenia co-edited and contributed to the book Art and Theory of Post-1989 Central and Eastern Europe: A Critical Anthology (The Museum of Modern Art, 2018).