“Birds of passage” is one of my recent  photo series presented as a winter semester work at Rampa Gallery of UJEP University in Czech Republic where I study now.

“Birds of passage” is a diary-style project describing my inner state of two first months after leaving Moscow for Czech Republic and comprising photographs (both mine own as well as my friend`s and unknown stuff found in abandoned house), self-portraits, texts of my diaries, notes, letter scans. It also includes video recording of my sitting on a chair in a busy street in Prague during the rush hour which expresses a quintessence of being in the middle of unknown foreign environment with no connection with the place and people with whom I share neither common language nor any kind of mutual interest.

This series is an attempt to convey my state of lost identity while starting a new life after leaving my homeland, a journey to unknown, falling out from habitual system of coordinates. In this case photography becomes not only the way of observing and studying new environment but also a way to find my physical place in it - metaphorically it is a way to appropriate things which gives me illusion that I own something, that though being lost I still exist.