graffiti

Xoubanova’s book Graffiti evokes the urban artistic movement that appeared in the 1970s in New York, renowned for its egocentric and identity-affirming dimension. It is the act of marking public space in the city with one’s name, of repeating one’s tag from street to street, of declaring one’s existence that interests Xoubanova here. In this phenomenon he sees a parallel with current social media practices and contemporary advertising discourse that he has been studying for a long time. Xoubanova devoted four years to building this hybrid body of photographic work, which brings together images alluding to a range of subjects, from communication and nature to social networking. The sequence of images illustrates and organizes the multiplicity and redundancy of an ever more vital affirmation of self (whether individual or collective)in the book shape. By getting over the rules (no cover, no appearing binding, unstructured pages layout) the book echoing to the uses of graffiti. This leading to an object qualified as baroque.