Margo Ovcharenko works primarily with portrait photography. In her works she discovers and celebrates primacy of sexuality, intimacy, and empowerment through femininity.
In her latest body of work she photographs queer women in the former USSR. This series of black and white pictures points at the sensation of disillusionment for a large group of people of Margo’s generation who believed in a possibility that their nations would embrace queerness as such and the hostility towards it will gradually come to an end.
Margo addresses the lack of cultural memory available for queer women in post-soviet world. Having been overshadowed by heterosexual mainstream, queerness – and especially female one – in the former USSR, always remained a current event with no history, with almost no visual legacy. Margo approaches this issue with an attempt to bring what could be this legacy upon modern-day queer portrait. Her main tool is posing, derivative of a soviet-era female body representation, with sport-related imaging being the most direct inspiration. The idea of physical tension under intangible circumstances – as in both competition and oppression – is a backbone for the whole series as well as some of Margo’s earlier works.
Her childhood background in gymnastics first led to her project called Furious Like a Child, dealing with an issue of forced exposure of female body in sports. This time she uses a somewhat reversed approach – inherently sexualized subject of queerness is shown through supposedly asexual posing and overall aesthetics reminiscent of Soviet-era propaganda. This way the visual identity of female queerness leans toward powerfulness, yet remains in the realm of attractiveness with the latter being a most potent device for female empowerment in Margo’s work.
Margo Ovcharenko, b. 1989, Krasnodar, Russia
Margo is a Moscow based artist. She graduated from The Rodchenko Art School in 2011 and Hunter College MFA program in the Spring 2015.
She resided at FABRICA S.P.A. in 2010-2011 (Italy); Treviso, Italy. Margo also received the Fulbright scholarship in 2013-2015.
She is represented by Russiantearoom gallery; Paris, France and Pop/Off/Art gallery; Moscow.
Selected prints through Aperture Foundation, New York, NY
For more of Margo’s work, click here.
For more information about how to submit for our showcase and see previous showcases, click here.
