Maria Kapajeva
Estonia
Family
Family
‘The series Family is an exploration of family as an integrated institution within its problems such as miscommunication or misunderstanding between its members. I collected many stories from people about how badly misunderstandings could end up because of a lack of essential daily communication. Based on this I selected seven most common scenarios and interpreted them by staging the imagined scenes in different locations.’
Although each story was photographed in one location, there were two images produced which exhibit next to each other. I am always interested in production of work, where the images are not just visual presentation of a story but the physical objects. Splitting one scene between two images, I tried to visualise a distance between the main characters caused by various reasons. Even though I have a peculiar scenario in my head for each pair of photographs, captions are not used, but left for the viewers’ own interpretation.
The series contains of 14 photographs in 7 pairs.
Maria Kapajeva
Maria Kapajeva is a Russian artist from Estonia based in London. She got her first BA Degree in Economics at University of Tartu. In 2006 she left her Marketing career behind and moved to the UK to get her BA in Photography at The University for the Creative Arts (UCA) and then MA in Photography at The University of Westminster.
During the last a few years Maria got the British Council PMI2 Award twice to produce new work in India. In 2012 The Photographers’ Gallery commissioned her for The World in London exhibition and in 2013 she was short-listed for The Title Art Prize and shown her work at FORMAT and Belfast Photo Festivals. Her work has been exhibited internationally in many countries such as the UK, Albania, Hungary, Estonia, USA, India and Brazil including the most recent shows at The Harn Art Museum (Gainesville, USA) and at Pushkin House (London, UK). This summer Maria works on her new body of work at The Bridge Guard Residency in Šturovo (Slovakia).
Together with her practice, Maria also teaches at The University for the Creative Arts at Farnham (UCA) and works as an editor for two online platforms: Global Archive Photography globalarchivephotography.com and fotofolios.org.
