Nikita Teryoshin: Nothing Personal – The Back Office of War
Årets Bilde 2024
Double exhibition opening Saturday March 15th at 2pm:
Every day on the news we are shown images of war and destruction. This coincides with global expenditure on arms increasing year after year. However, we are rarely afforded a glimpse behind the curtains of the global arms business. Nikita Teryoshin travelled to 16 arms fairs on four continents to investigate what happens before wars take place, infiltrating the backstage of what appears to be the complete opposite of a battlefield, and more like an oversized playground for adults with wine, finger foods and shiny weapons.
Here, dead bodies are mannequins or pixels on screens of a huge number of simulators. Bazookas and machine guns are plugged into flatscreens and war action is staged in an artificial environment in front of high-ranking guests, ministers, heads of states, generals and traders. Teryoshin deliberately obscures the faces of the business men and women present as it is not his intention to fix blame on individuals. The anonymised arms dealers can be seen as a metaphor for a business operating in the shadows and under the radar of the media. The casual nature of his observations combined with the bright innocent colour palette which runs throughout the imagery is a sinister contrast to the goods on sale.
The exhibition includes images, texts and slogan’s like ‘70 years defending peace’ or, ‘Engineering a better tomorrow.’ Even though it is hard to imagine that anybody in the weapons industry believe in these things, Nikita brings forward a remarkable quote from the inventor of the machine gun Richard Gatling: ‘It occurred to me that if I could invent a machine—a gun—which could, by its rapidity of fire,enable one man to do as much battle duty as 100, that it would, to a large extent, supersede the necessity of large armies and consequently, exposure to battle and disease be greatly diminished.
Ironically, rather than decreasing the number of soldiers on the battlefield, his invention led to unimaginably greater bloodshed.The Gatling gun laid the foundations for a new class of machine; the automatic weapon.
Teryoshin first began photographing all types of fairs—agriculture, pets, funerals—because his photography school in Dortmund, Germany was next door to a giant expo hall. In 2016 he ended up at a hunting fair—Hunt and dog—and was surprised how guns, in this instance hunting rifles, attracted old and young visitors. After publishing his series Sons and guns, he became curious to find out what happens at professional arms fairs. Over a period of eight years he visited expositions in Poland, Belarus, South Korea, France, Germany, South Africa, China, UAE, Peru, Russia, Vietnam, USA and India.
Based in Berlin, Nikita Teryoshin (b. 1986) was born in Leningrad, USSR. When he was 13-years old his family moved to Dortmund, Germany where he went on to earn a Bachelor of Arts in Photography. ‘Nothing Personal – the back office of war’ was published by GOST books in 2024, and is his first monograph. His work has also been awarded the World Press Photo 2020 first prize in the Contemporary Issues category, nominated for the Picture of the Year, awarded the Miami Street Photography Festival 2019 first prize in Series, World Report Award first prize at Fotografia Etica (IT) 2020, and became Leica Oskar Barnack Finalist 2021. He describes his genres as street, documentary and everyday horror and is a member of Burn My Eye photography collective.
Parallel to Teryoshin’s exhibition in the outdoor atrium, all winning categories of Årets Bilde 2024 (Picture of the Year Award) will be on display in the Project Space. As part of Saturday’s exhibition opening there will also be artist talks with Teryoshin and the winners of Årets Bilde.
The exhibition is on until the end of May, free and open to all. Welcome!
Grateful bows to Fritt Ord, Hav Eiendom and Oslo municipality for their support of Fotografihuset’s exhibition program 2024.
