Alisa Resnik

One another

‘ICI LA NUIT EST IMMENSE’ (‘Here the night is immense’), proclaims, in big red letters, the 42 Hours of Night painting by Sarkis. An intriguing oxymoron that sounds either like a promise or a threat.

Alisa Resnik’s exhibition One Another, named after the photographer’s book of the same title (Dewi Lewis Publishing, 2014), could be the story of a single and endless night linking Berlin to Saint Petersburg and Moscow. An endless night with no dawn, stretching over deserted towns and sliding into interiors with worn-out carpets and benches, and where, against a backdrop of faded curtains and wallpaper, people pass by in front of or pose for Alisa Resnik.

Sometimes in a state of a wild abandonment, sometimes defiant to or ignoring the camera, these protagonists seem to be acting in a play combining familiar themes and a crime thriller. A succession of solitary people, with disfigured faces, washed-out bodies, alone or wrapped in an embrace, balancing over an abyss or frozen in a nightmare where the ninth door could open any moment.

Alisa Resnik photographs life and its reflection, fragility, grace, melancholy, and solitude. Out of a troubling and anguished universe she constructs an image where one feels, above all, her profound empathy for the people and places she photographs.

Playing with darkness and dusk, she recreates the red curtain atmosphere of an old local theatre, or the environment of a David Lynch film. Empty bars and hotel corridors, deserted factories, houses that seem empty yet whose windows are lit up, trees covered with snow or decorations — all these break up or punctuate her procession of portraits. Her clear and precise images transcend the habitual out-of-focus style achieving a strange and poetic vision.

The world of Alisa Resnik has built up over time and resonates with her travels and encounters between the East and the West, through workshop experiences with Antoine d’Agata and Anders Petersen, or Giorgia Fiorio’s master classes, as well as through her study of classical Italian painting.

Alisa Resnik’s palette of colors is a dark one, deep reds and greens that absorb the rare light and remind one of the tragic tones of Caravaggio.

Her damned are reminiscent of d’Agata’s The Descent into Hell, her night scenes, those of Anders Petersen’s Café Lehmitz in Hamburg, with the drunks, sailors and prostitutes. However, over and above these references, the most important aspect of Alisa Resnik’s work is her haunting photographic style, with its tender and sympathetic approach to her subject matter.

The exhibition One Another resembles the portrait of a huis clos that reassures and protects more than it troubles. Or, at least, the portrait of a family whose members, perhaps, squabble a little, but where there is still an element of fondness.

Laura Serani

Alisa Resnik was born in Saint Petersburg in 1976. In 1990, after the collapse of the USSR, she and her parents moved to Berlin. In 2008, following her graduation (she studied philosophy and art history in Berlin and Bologna), Resnik took to photography, travelled around Europe, went to Russia and Ukraine.

In 2009, Alisa Resnik took part in the TPW seminar with Antoine d’Agata (Tuscany, Italy); the next year she participated in a seminar of the photography school Ostkreuzschule für Fotografie (Berlin, Germany) with Anders Petersen; in 2010-2012 she attended Giorgia Fiorio’s master classes.

Since 2009, Alisa Resnik’s works have been exhibited by museums and galleries in Italy, France, Spain, Switzerland, and Austria. That same year she became a laureate of the Italian competition Winephoto and of Descubrimientos PHE (PHotoEspaña’s portfolio review). In 2013, Resnik’s book One Another, published by Actes Sud under the title of L’un L’autre, received the European Publishers Award.