photo series
analog and digital, black & white, colour, 35mm, medium format 6x6, 6x7
analog prints from negative, 70 × 70 cm, 80 x 120 cm, mounted and framed
Wallpaper | Sound Installation

For this long-term project, the work of Katharina Gruzei explores the Moscow metro and its socio-political and historical implications. In this spirit, “Mir Metro” (Мир метро), Russian for “Metro World,” stands emblematically for the exploration of an everyday place beneath the city. While transit areas are frequently described as “non-places” in being transitory by nature, Moscow’s metro represents in fact its antithesis. Begun as a prestigious project of the USSR (the so-called “Palaces for the People”) and constructed simultaneously to serve as bunkers, Moscow’s metro has always been conceived as a place simply to be. To this day, it offers a habitat wherein socio-political tendencies have always been evident. Katharina Gruzei takes a kaleidoscopic look at this semi-public space and weaves her series of photographs into a journey through space and time.