For the project Shoal, he created structures based on representations of the typical post-Soviet landscape and installed them on the silt banks of the Aral Sea.
Today, the post-Soviet landscape, constituting a ghost of utopia, epitomizes the current mundanity of the countries of the former Soviet Union.
These ghosts do not exist in our time but instead inhabit a space that continues to exist, imbued with new life.
The project Shoal represents an attempt to separate this ghostlike space from contemporaneity, transferring it to a “nowhere land,” namely to the bottom of a sea that has shrunk by 90%. The Aral Sea, once the fourth largest sea in the world, fell victim to a utopian regime and disappeared together with it, leaving behind a blank space.
About Danila Tkachenko
Danila Tkachenko is a Russian photographer and visual artist whose practice lies at the intersection of conceptual photography, landscape, and political inquiry. His work examines how ideology, power, and utopia are inscribed into territory, exploring isolated spaces, abandoned architecture, and landscapes transformed into symbols of control, collapse, or unfulfilled promise. Through long-term projects, he constructs a precise and restrained vision in which the landscape functions as both a physical and psychological archive of recent history.
His work has received extensive international recognition. Among other honors, he has won the Global Peace Photo Award (2024), the European Publishers Award for Photography, Foam Talent, the LensCulture Exposure Awards, the PDN Photo Annual, and World Press Photo (1st Prize, Stories, Staged Portraits). He has also been a finalist or selected for awards such as the Leica Oskar Barnack Award, the Kandinsky Prize, the Gabriele Basilico Prize, and Magnum Photos 30 Under 30.
Tkachenko has held solo exhibitions in galleries and museums across Europe, Asia, and the Americas, with recent shows in Paris, Milan, Venice, Berlin, Düsseldorf, Antwerp, Moscow, and Taiwan. His work has also been included in group exhibitions at major institutions such as the Musée des Civilisations de l’Europe et de la Méditerranée in Marseille, the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, the Benaki Museum in Athens, and the Centre de la Photographie Genève, as well as at international photography festivals across Europe, Asia, and the Americas. These presentations have consolidated his position as one of the most compelling and critically engaged voices in contemporary European photography. [Official Website]
