BELONGING / POLITICAL LANDSCAPE / DOCUMENTARY
KOLSKY
Tanya Sharapova
Tanya Sharapova’s debut book Kolsky is a photographic project about the Kola Peninsula in northwestern Russia. Bordering Finland and Norway, Kola is a strategically important and heavily militarised region, home to Russia’s Northern Fleet and major nuclear, military and industrial infrastructure. Fishing, oil, gas and mineral extraction are central to its economy, while its Soviet history has left a lasting mark on the region’s communities and environment.
Sharapova returned to the peninsula repeatedly from 2019 to 2024, witnessing a period of significant political and social change. Rather than presenting Kola simply as either a remote Arctic landscape or a symbol of contemporary Russia, Kolsky approaches it as a complex region shaped by overlapping historical and political forces. Following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, propaganda, self-censorship and social pressure became increasingly visible in everyday life. Through close relationships with the people she photographs, Sharapova allows her subjects to participate in shaping their own representations, creating images that move between the absurd, the unsettling and the intimate. The book also considers personal expression and sexual freedom as forms of resistance to the state’s increasingly rigid notion of “traditional values.”
Clothbound hardcover
96 pages
41 photographs and found material
An essay by Andrei Zavadski
Offset printing
21 x 26 cm
First edition of 500 copies
ISBN 978-91-990235-6-4
Designed by Janne Riikonen and Tanya Sharapova
Pre-order discount: 35 €
Or get a signed copy to support the artist and the crowd-funding campaign by clicking here.
To be released at AFF Gallery in Berlin on September 10th.
Pre-orders are sent to customers the following week.
In January 2012, Henri Airo’s little sister was killed in a hit-and-run by a repeat drunk driver. In that instant, his family’s life was divided into what was before and after.
While the Airo family struggled with the loss, the national media covered the crash and the subsequent police investigation extensively. The police focused on technical details—crash simulations, blood tests—while media narratives reduced the case to a drama between the innocent victim and the malicious perpetrator. The resulting documents and reports examined drunk driving and alcoholism in Finnish society but largely ignored the social circumstances surrounding addiction.
In 2018 Airo came across the original police report. It felt incomplete. Together with primary eye-witnesses and actors, Airo began to re-visualise scenes which had been glossed over in the documents.
Probable Cause draws on media and police archives, re-enactment and Airo’s personal testimony to understand the circumstances of his sister’s death. By restructuring existing narratives, the project reveals multiple personal perspectives embedded within the official record. In reconstructing the perpetrator’s day, speculation and doubt become entry points for reflecting on how addiction is perceived in Finnish society.