Yevgen Nikiforov

The project aims to research, collect, document, and preserve 20th-century mosaics as a way of cherishing the past, celebrating cultural diversity, and creating a bridge between generations, while also promoting the importance of preserving cultural heritage worldwide. 

Yevgen Nikiforov’s focus is on researching, spotting, and documenting (through the medium of photography) some of the lesser known works created by so-called “non-artists”. “Non-artists” were creators with no specific training in the monumental arts whose activities, though they invoke familiar historical art categorizations (“naive,” “provincial,” “amateur,” “folk,” and “outsider” art), prompting us to revisit these well-known terms.

The desired outcome is to create a database of photographed mosaics which may become a part of the archive Nikiforov has been working on since 2014; to uncover the least documented monumental art pieces in Ukraine’s public space and to systematize his findings. Nikiforov will travel to photograph the mosaics in situ.

My research and photography project is devoted to the study of the architectural and social features of the phenomenon of Ukrainian mosaics of the Soviet period. The project aims to research, collect, document, and preserve mosaics of the twentieth century to cherish the past, celebrate cultural diversity, and create a bridge between generations while also promoting the importance of preserving cultural heritage worldwide. The monumental mosaics can be seen literally in every part of Ukraine. These works have an extraordinary fate. They were conceived primarily as public space decorations. But citizens never thought about the mosaics as something valuable. I plan to make a series of expeditions to remote villages and small towns all over the country to make a documentation of a hidden part of monumental art, so called "outsider mosaics," which were never mentioned in periodicals or books, thereby remaining out of the attention of art critics and art historians.