Margo OVCHARENKO is born in1989 in Krasnodar, Russia

Margo is a Bangkok based artist.

She graduated from The Rodchenko Art School in 2011 and Hunter College MFA program in the Spring 2015. She resided at FABRICA S.P.A. in 2010 2011(Italy); Treviso, Italy. Margo also received the Fulbright scholarship in 2013 2015.

Margo was the only Russian artist to be included into  « Régénération. Les photographes internationaux du demain », edited by Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne, Switzerland.

Works in collections

Musée de l'Elysée; Lausanne (Switzerland); Multimedia Art Museum; Moscow (Russia); Fotomuseum Winterthur’s Library book collection; Winterthur (Switzerland) ; Arendt & Medernach (Luxembourg)

Words of the artist

« I was born on February 6th, 1989. My father being an artist and my mother a lawyer, my pass in life was obvious to me : I took drawing lessons since I was very young but I finally decided to get into law school. When I was fifteen years old, while learning visual arts, I started to go to a photography workshop. As I lived in Krasnodar, I was eager to learn, I would go to every open photography lessons as well as conferences on contemporary art and history of motion pictures. »

« At the age of 17, I realized that what I wanted to obtain in making portraits was to avoid the effect of pose. I wanted a dressed character to look like if he was naked ; to give the same perception of light and colours as paintings before the nineteenth century.

I like that distance between the model and the spectator becomes narrower. I like photography that does not metamorphose its subject to make it more attractive ; though I like better slighlty fuzzy time and spatial changes around my characters.

To me, the names of my favourite photographs go along with the painters I love.

I look for emotion in art. I prefer the simplicity in northern or western european photography in the 80’s and 90’s, but also paintings from these regions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

I concentrate my work on light, colour, silence and on the look that accompagny the spectator into the work without imposing anything, without brutality. I love taking pictures of people between their childhood and their age of maturity. However, a rebellion spirit does not interest me. »          

Margo works primarily with portrait photography. In her works she discovers and celebrates primacy of sexuality, intimacy, and empowerment through femininity. She often employs her memories as scenarios and substitutes meaning for reality where a single person becomes a signifier for many others. Margo also strives to address the shifting points of view: voyeur/participant, objectifier/lover, judge/supporter, God/photographer.

In her latest body of work she photographs queer women in the former USSR. This series of black and white pictures points at the sensation of disillusionment for a large group of people of Margo’s generation who believed in a possibility that their nations would embrace queerness as such and the hostility towards it will gradually come to an end. Margo addresses the lack of cultural memory available for queer women in post-soviet world. Having been overshadowed by heterosexual mainstream, queerness - and especially female one - in the former USSR, always remained a current event with no history, with almost no visual legacy. Margo approaches this issue with an attempt to bring what could be this legacy upon modern-day queer portrait. Her main tool is posing, derivative of a soviet-era female body representation, with sport-related imaging being the most direct inspiration. The idea of physical tension under intangible circumstances - as in both competition and oppression - is a backbone for the whole series as well as some of Margo’s earlier works. Her childhood background in gymnastics first led to her project called Furious Like a Child, dealing with an issue of forced exposure of female body in sports. This time she uses a somewhat reversed approach - inherently sexualized subject of queerness is shown through supposedly asexual posing and overall aesthetics reminiscent of Soviet-era propaganda. This way the visual identity of female queerness leans toward powerfulness, yet remains in the realm of attractiveness with the latter being a most potent device for female empowerment in Margo’s work.