Introduction
Home. For Irina Ruppert this is a landscape, a smell of food, ammonia, slaughtered animals and certain sweetness. Home, that is colours such as the ones of the Kazakh steppe, where in spring black and red tulips blow. It is the light during dawn – and it is the subject of her photography. Her work is about origin, affiliation, and identity. It deals with all the internal images of the land of her childhood, that she left when she was eight moving with her family from Kazakhstan to Germany; these images are still imprinted in her memory today. “I carry this landscape inside me and I am constantly looking for it“, says Irina Ruppert.
The past and her memories have become her home. Her photographic view onto things reflects her origin and her longing that result from this uprooting. Where do I belong? What shaped me? Irina Ruppert’s questions are as individual as they are universal. They are also highly topical in our global society where more and more people leave their home country due to poverty, unemployment and lack of prospects. “My works always deal to some extent with migration. They tell about my own identity and the identity of people in other countries.“
Irina Ruppert’s images are beyond the clichés often connoted with Eastern Europe. Her work “Rodina“ – which means ”home“ in Russian – does not intend to display poverty, alcoholism, violence or a rough life. These images are fragments of her memory. In Russia, Kazakhstan, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia and the Ukraine, she portraits the quiet things, originals, village life. “For me this simplicity is beauty.“
In Romania she met “Cortorar Gypsies", sheet metal gypsies, by whom she was fascinated due to their traditional culture and their social cohesion; among them she also discovered that affiliation might be deceptive even in a fixed place. For eight years she has returned regularly to the Romanian villages to see the Cortorar Gypsies; they live there amidst society but are nevertheless exposed to all prejudices and injustices that Roma encounter everywhere else in Europe.
While the European Union debates about the question of how to deal with Roma and while they are often made scapegoat, Irina Ruppert visits the people. She listens to them and she remains silent with them. She takes time for them and she cuts herself out of time. One year she takes their pictures, and the following year she brings these pictures back. She builds trust. It is a give and take; that is important. It is all about the person in the pictures – not about poverty, not about wealth.
The beauty of the images always also implies the melancholy of the momentariness. In Irina Ruppert’s work „Blumenstück“ flowers grow in front of a deep black background; they are planted in improvised pots – yoghurt cups, tin cans, water bottles. The pots are memories of her childhood in the East, but they also symbolise a place, where flowers need to strike new roots. It nearly seems as if their essence lived on in the shapes and themes of their pots. How does the place where we are determine us? Irina Ruppert’s photos challenge the beholder to such questions. She herself is in the process of finding her home over and over again – by recreating herself, through her photographic view onto the East.
Daniela Zinser 01/2014