Anastasia Tsayder
From the series NII

Anastasia Tsayder is an artist who works with post-documentary photography and installation, enriching the socio-historical precision of documentary work with a poetic rhetoric to create magnetic strong images. 

She produced the series NII in 2017, when press secretary Yulia Shulyak and the Young Scientists’ Board of the Shemyakin and Ovchinnikov Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry at the Russian Academy of Sciences proposed a collaboration with contemporary artists in order to dispel the myth of the scientific hub’s «inaccessibility.»

Tsayder spent a month working at the institute’s building in Miklukho-Maklay Street in Moscow. The building, erected in the mid-1970s, is a remarkable example of late Soviet modernism. According to legend, the plan for the complex, which resembles the double helix of DNA, was drafted by the institute’s director Yury Ovchinnikov in collaboration with architect Yuri Platonov. Instead of the buildings’ stunning architecture, however, Tsayder chose to focus on the inner life of the institute, as if suspended in time, and to construct silent events of the environment itself. Choosing to capture the in-between spaces of curtains and corridors or their fragments, she conveyed the building’s eerie emptiness: there are no people in these interiors, which seem deliberately unfunctional or unsightly. Concentrating light, Tsayder produced shots of even density, both in the case of general views and interior detail, at times creating a Lynchean intensity through composition and color. Thus, the liminal state between what has happened and what is to come is formed. In NII, Tsayder built on the method she developed in Arcadia (2016–2021), where the image is not a complete picture or view dominated by the aesthetic aspect, but an environment manifesting existential questions.