Maria Quigley

This is a story about how repetition and state nostalgia turn images into memory. It moves from a Cold War spy series to eight hundred hours of Russian state television, and how that same machinery produced Vladimir Putin.

“Eighteen Moments of Spring is made entirely in my babushka’s Soviet-era flat in St. Petersburg, where my earliest memories were formed. A television has been on there for as long as I can remember. Over the last six years, I have watched almost eight hundred hours of Russian state television in this apartment. Working inside the flat, I turn the television itself into my print surface. In total darkness, I press photosensitive chromogenic paper directly against the glass of my childhood CRT set, which cannot be paused or rewound. Each sheet records whatever is being broadcast, guided by what my grandmother watches. The viewing schedule I follow is hers; she has always been the curator of what Russia has meant to me. This archive becomes mine.

My grandmother was born in St. Petersburg in 1941, during the siege, when the city was still called Leningrad. Through her screen, I watch the Great Patriotic War return daily, as if the year were always 1945. I have made more than five hundred TV prints from this screen. In parallel, I photograph the flat with a German wooden camera from the 1930s, using the same photosensitive paper with exposures lasting up to twenty minutes. Everything made here is a copy of something that came before. Everything remains correct by being backward.”