John Peter Askew: We

Preview: 14 June, 6 – 8pm
Exhibition dates: 15 June – 18 August

John Peter Askew is an artist who works with the camera. For 30 years he has travelled to the easternmost city in Europe, Perm, in Russia. ‘We’ is a kind of epic Russian novel told across multiple generations, based on the lives of a single family, the Chulakovs. The exhibition reveals this landmark body of work for the first time. It is accompanied by a major 380 page book published by Kerber, with new writing from leading photographic historians and curators including Ian Jeffrey and Fatos Ustek.

Askew’s poetic and playful photographs are a kind of album for the extended family stretching from the Atlantic to the Urals. Although Askew’s work is an extended portrait of the post-Soviet world, seen through its many transitions across a quarter century, ‘We’ pictures a better world: one in which we too can discover moments of rare, radiant beauty.

Image: Red Rocking Horse, courtesy of the artist