What characterizes Kristina Borinskaya (@borinskayakristina)’s project Love and Anguish isn’t the atmosphere of broken dialogues but rather the awkward relationship between two psychologically distant bodies, and the events from the past, from a hypothetical future, or from a present not lived to its full. What is it that keeps lovers together? What brings them apart? What’s the meaning of loving? Does desire exist with no objectification? Answers float in the suspended time in the shoots and seem not to be present for real.
Real-like mise-en-scène situations hang in the balance between fiction and reality, immersed in an intimate atmosphere that results familiar to the spectator. The direct and still light transforms the photographer’s personal experience in a collective narration, where everyone can project themselves. If it feels like a dream, this dream is scary. In contrast, if it feels like reality, looking persistently at the photos dissolves the two faces in anonymous masks. There’s a moment in life when strangers become phantoms from the past, and new expressions and physiognomies are impossible to accept.
Women are apparently at the opposite pole from men, irreconcilable with the feminine nature of the former. The observer usually cannot but identify with women when represented in media. However, the truth is that there is no man or woman, feminine or masculine. There’s only the human being, between in the act of dominating another vulnerable body, the object of a desire. This desire is itself incommunicable when love lacks communication. Smiles and expressions disappear, and words and laughs give in to the anguish of silence embodied in full from the lovers’ bodies.
When love relationships are presented, the reality is shown in its full banality, and what isn’t said clearly implodes in the subconscious of whoever's gaze. Solitude never invades the scenes, but is creeping latently, pleasantly, and tirelessly. All portraits of fragmented relationships, media seem to be intimate spaces where a couple shouts silently, pretending to have a voice. The stillness of human solitude is exalted in Kristina’s photos, together with the ineluctability of time passing by and invading rooms and existences.
Kristina is the woman depicted in the pictures, a child raised with no father, and still seeking his traces in her partner. She encapsulates the contradictions of a heterosexual relationship analyzing how the absence of a paternal figure has affected her choice of her partner.
The so-called fourth wall breaks down, and in the tiny domestic rooms, childhood traumas re-incarnate within losses and absences. Personality constructs and relationship dynamics are constantly based on past experiences, and reality is the summa of facts, and these images are themselves facts. These photos are all the pregnant facts of Kristina’s life and consist of being all the elements in a relationship that made up of distance and attraction. Considering the contradictions between generations, cultures, and ideologies, it could be argued that the relationships between men and women are all part of the contemporary human comedy, where there’s no desire without objectification, and love has no meaning for those who aren’t able to communicate it.