Sergei Pavlov ^{Emerging artist}

Artist's country of origin: Finland

The basis of my artistic practice is autobiographical documentary photography. I document encounters that happen in my own life, striving to create images that capture the emotional essence of the people, places, and situations I encounter. From photographing my grandmother to the queer community in Tokyo, I try to establish a shared emotional trust and intimacy in which the photographs are created. In my works and exhibitions, I weave together new and old images to create installations that highlight the complexity of life. I believe that life has no one truth, and so with my photographs I want to create spaces that can be viewed from many directions. Through my work, I aim to move beyond verbal definition and into emotional examination, trying to create images that speak to viewers on a deep, intuitive level. My photographs are captured in emotional situations, and I believe they convey a powerful emotional essence. Instead of theoretical thinking, I aim to create exhibitions that quiet our thinking minds and open us to emotional examination of life itself. By doing so, I hope to help viewers realize how we create stories, identities, and assumptions in our minds. My overall artistic philosophy is rooted in the belief that photography is a medium that can connect us on an emotional level. Modern humans are instinctively led to look at images through emotional response rather than conceptualization. That’s why I try to create somewhat natural, realistic yet healthy work of portraiture that I hope has the sense of opening us up emotionally to each other. I believe that photography should be made and looked without explanations because its biggest strength lies in its verbal silence. I don’t work with a clear work plan or one project, but my artistic work is integrated like a web into all areas of my own life. I live in an ascetic and nomadic way where I act intuitively, impulsively, following the inner experience of what seems important to me without a larger search for meaning in itself. Even though my work and methodology is difficult to put into comprehensible words, I am not interested in claiming its usefulness and reasonability in a capitalistic manner. I believe the artistic meaning shouldn’t always be justified through words, because at times maybe search and not-knowing itself can help us all to get closer to openness that is beyond words.