Palimpsests is a photographic exploration of post-Soviet built environment looked at from the perspective of the everyday and discarding the exoticizing visual tropes that dominate the narrative about this area. Photographed between 2010 and 2017 in over 70 locations across five post-Soviet countries, it captures the typical and the most mundane structures and elements of urban landscape that could be seen in almost any post-Soviet locality.

How to View

During the day, Palimpsests can be viewed on monitors inside the ICP Museum and during evening hours, images are literally “projected” onto the windows of the ICP Museum; they can be viewed from the sidewalk outside the Museum and are most visible after sunset. Learn more about Projected.

About the Artist

Born in St. Petersburg (then Leningrad) in 1975, raised in Siberia and educated in Siberia and France, Max Sher took up photography in 2006. Having started out as a photojournalist he has then moved on into art photography and installation art, while also doing assignments for international print and online media. His work, personal and commissioned, has been exhibited both at home and internationally and has appeared in Monocle, The Guardian, Bloomberg Businessweek, the New York Times Magazine, Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin, Observer: The New Review, and Financial Times Weekend, among others, as well as in photography and art publications including Foto8 and Fraction. Sher's first artist book, A Remote Barely Audible Evening Waltz, was published by Treemedia Publishers in 2013. His second book, Palimpsests, which completed the eponymous seven-year project, was published by Ad Marginem with the support of Heinrich Böll Foundation in January 2018.