Artist — Katya Rozhkova. Photographer — Ivan Boyko.
"The White School" is Katya Rozhkova's exhibition at the Shchepochkin Manor in Polotnyany Zavod — an eighteenth-century house that has miraculously survived to our own day, largely because it once housed a school.
The locals never called the building the Shchepochkin House. They called it the white school. And the name stuck. For the artist, the white school is also an ideal: a place with no bullying, no cruelty, no monster-teachers.
The project took shape as a gallery of children's portraits — figures from different generations, at once recognisable and timeless. The children do not smile; they retreat into themselves, the way one does before a camera, before an exam, before something that matters.
Here, school appears before the viewer for what it truly is — a place where fears take root and where the first images of the world are formed, a rehearsal for everything that comes after. The children in the portraits look like a terracotta army guarding the space of learning and of those unspoken lessons for the future which teachers do not always pass on cheerfully (in our childhood, we were told: "Didn't forget your head at home, did you?", "A forest of hands!"). A soundtrack woven from schoolroom sayings and the Soviet song "Indonesia, Our Native Land" completes an atmosphere instantly familiar to any generation.
The project draws on images of schoolchildren as a composite portrait of many generations. Together with the photographer Ivan Boyko, the artist travelled to a number of schools in Kaluga, visited an art school in Moscow, and worked on-site at Polotnyany Zavod. Everywhere they went, they were searching for those particular faces — for that archetypal childlike gaze, which today can be hard to make out beneath a veneer of worldliness and the trained readiness to pose for social media. It was these faces that were used to populate the school with life, in the form of painted canvases.
The space already possessed a powerful visual character of its own, and rather than fight it, the artist chose to play along. That is why the paintings carry the very shades of industrial paint once used in this school back in Soviet times. In this way the portraits and the school became one.
It was also important to the artist to preserve the natural light, using no artificial sources at all. As she puts it: "I don't see these works as separate from the space. I've watched it change at dusk, at dawn, at midday — I know by heart when and where every ray of light falls."
However much the artist intervened in the life of the space through her project, the true protagonist remained the house itself. And it went on living its own life. The caretaker, for instance, would occasionally rehang the works as he saw fit, and the artist had no choice but to accept it.
Katya Rozhkova on the project, for Seasons of Life magazine:
"A few years ago the school was closed for the building to be restored, but the work never began, and the manor was slowly dying. It was the only one to have survived at Polotnyany Zavod, which was devastated during the war.
I first walked into this house when snow was lying on the inlaid parquet floor painted with red lead. It had drifted in from under the balcony door. My breath came out in clouds. Northern light poured through the windows, as in the paintings of Vilhelm Hammershøi or Grigory Soroka. Sumptuous painted ceiling medallions overhead — and Soviet oil paint at eye level: that same band the walls were painted in everywhere, in schools and kindergartens, hospitals and stairwells.
I wanted to fill this house with life again. And I started drawing children — quite literally multiplying them, so that they would be everywhere: in the corridors, in the rooms, behind the stove.
The idea of 'populating' this space with children came to me at once. Children are the true keepers of this house, the guardians of a vanished world. I drew and drew children — some who by now have become grandmothers and grandfathers, and others entirely of today, quite specific. But these are not so much portraits of real people as a collective image of children from different eras."
