Artist Statement
Anna Chobotova (b. 1979, Karelia) is an artist working with photography and the artist’s book. She explores internal isolation as a structural effect of contemporary reality. Operating on the boundary between documentation and reconstruction, she captures gestures, voids, and material residues of everyday life. In 2025, she was shortlisted for the Leica 100 Years project as one of the top 100 photographers.
Artist Statement
In my practice, I explore internal isolation as a structural effect of contemporary reality. I am interested in how this experience manifests through forms of presence, absence, and traces of a person within everyday space.
My work operates on the boundary between documentary observation and authorial reconstruction. I record found situations, objects, and environmental elements, reinterpreting them through the frame, the pause, and the shift of focus. The human figure, when present, is stripped of any narrative function and is considered a measure of space or one of its traces, rather than the center of an event.
My projects focus not on depicting events, but on their residues — gestures, voids, material forms, and environmental states in which the experience of lived time is sedimented. Space acts as an active carrier of memory and internal tension, while photography serves as a tool for the analytical fixation of these processes.
The context of my practice is the experience of living under conditions of prolonged tension and constraint, where everyday life loses its eventfulness, and time is perceived as dense and opaque. This shapes a visual language of silence and internal isolation, inviting the viewer to connect individual experience with broader social and cultural processes.
Education
2026 — Yulia Pavlova’s “Project Photography” course, “Photography Genres from a 21st-Century Perspective. Project Thinking” course by Ekaterina Vasilyeva.
2025 — Yulia Pavlova “Memorial Laboratory”
2024 — “Artist’s Book, Zine” courses by Yulia Pavlova, “Collage” course by Oleg Borodin.
2008-2023 Author’s courses, master classes by leading Russian and foreign photographers (Studio Harcourt
(Paris), Magnum Photos, Mark Fearnley (London), Leica Akademie: Alan Schaller, Alexander Medvedev, Andrey
Chezhin, Igor Sakharov.
2006-2007 Academy of International Cooperation, international diploma with a degree in photography
2004
-2005 — The University of Manchester, PD in Cultural Management (менеджер в сфере культуры).
1996-2001 Karelian State University Pedagogical University, Faculty of Foreign Languages
(Finnish, English)
Personal exhibitions
2022 “Walking in Paris”, MBU TO “KUZMOLOVSKAYA DSHI"/Saint Petersburg
2015 “Disappearing Shadows”, Karelian State Philharmonic/Petrozavodsk
2012 “Letters from childhood”, Fotonerds Gallery,/Joensuu, Finland
Group exhibitions
2025 “Interference Field” installation, Art Garden Gallery, Saint Petersburg
2024 The collage exhibition of the Parisian collage club Earth Dance/ Paris
2024 'Rezh da Klej' fest “Nichese”, Moscow, ARBUZZ Gallerymuseum of Moscow.
2024 Mobile shelf of zines and photo books of the Nizina project.
2024 Pilot project of Zines and the author’s book “Paper Stories” , Petrozavodsk
2020 “Breaking the Kalevala Codes” Russian Center for Science and Culture, Helsinki +Estonia+Lithuania+ Budapest
2019 “Opening the Kalevala codes”, Museum of Fine Arts of the Republic of Karelia/ Petrozavodsk
2017 Monocle, a photo exhibition based on the results of the All-Russian photo contest dedicated to the monocle lens/
K. A. Timiryazev Library
2011 “Author-time”, Industrial History Gallery/Petrozavodsk
2010 “The time of the day.OnegaTraktorny LOFT project, Cultural Initiative Center/ Petrozavodsk
Selected publications
F-STOP a photography magazine (group exhibition, issue — Object Image)
Интервью для Ilford
Интервью для Leica