A Child in Time

20 Feb-23 Feb 2025

Overview

Pavel Otdelnov’s latest exhibition, A Child in Time, extends the inquiry of his acclaimed Hometown project, offering a personal exploration of Soviet childhood in the 1980s. 

A Child in Time at the A.P.T. Gallery in Deptford February 20-23rd is part of Pavel Otdelnov’s acclaimed ongoing series exploring the contradictions of growing up in Soviet Russia in the 1980s as society transformed. Otdelnov came to adolescence in the Perestroika era, a malleable time of contested freedoms and passionate debate. Yet this was also an era of acute instability. There were chastening queues for rationed bread, crises gripped the nation, and for children like Otdelnov, the threat of nuclear war was a pervasive source of anxiety. Civil defence lessons vividly depicted catastrophic scenarios, and fears of annihilation were compounded in 1986 by the Chernobyl disaster. A Child in Time echoes the anxieties and dreams of this period, which identifies a generation often referred to as “the last Soviet pioneers”.

One strand in A Child in Time is Otdelnov’s reimagining of his Soviet school primer, where each letter of the alphabet carried symbolic weight, subtly embedding Soviet ideals into the fabric of a child’s perception and language. This book made the rhetoric of propaganda feel as natural and familiar as the ordinary words of everyday life. Otdelnov’s Primer replaces the Soviet pictures with illustrations of his angst. Primer is both a lens for understanding how ideology permeates early learning and a means of confronting the lasting imprints of this indoctrination.

In Television, another central theme of the project, Otdelnov interrogates how this medium affected him and shaped the cultural and emotional complexity of the time. A programme like Good Night, Little Ones, with its charming animated theme offered moments of innocence. However, this was invariably followed by the nightly news programme Vremya (Time), which filled households with a quiet sense of unease. There were prime-time broadcasts of psychics and hypnotists like Anatoly Kashpirovsky, a Soviet counterpoint to Billy Graham, who instead of mesmerising audiences for financial gain attempted mass hypnosis at the state’s behest. 

Otdelnov’s paintings conceived at this critical juncture in post-Soviet history investigate the roots of the current disaster and how this indoctrination has shaped society.