Petersburg Underground

Born in Paris, France, in 1969.
She lives and works in Helsinki, Finland, and St. Petersburg, Russia.

For the 56th Biennale di Venezia, Roberts has created a suite of photographic group portraits inspired by the bronze reliefs that decorate the Narvskaya metro station in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg). A cornerstone of the city's Post-World-War-II reconstruction effort, the Narvskaya metro station features a socialist-realist-style frieze depicting workers from twelve key professions. Urban legend has it that real individuals were the models for these idealized portraits — exemplary workers anonymously commemorated for their service to the state. Although there is no record of the individuals who served as models, many people of this generation and from these precise professions still live — and even work — in St.Petersburg today. For the project “Petersburg Underground,” Roberts sought these people out and photographed them at the St. Petersburg Academy of Fine Arts sculpture studios, where most of the artists responsible for the Narvskaya friezes studied. The quiet dignity of Roberts's subjects, with their frail bodies and noble postures, is deeply unsettling. Witnesses of the dramatic changes Russia has experienced since the frieze's creation, they momentarily reanimate the ideals that inspired the Soviet worker's state while insisting on the lived reality of its inhabitants. Revisiting the Narvskaya friezes by way of urban legend and photographic re-enactment, Roberts infuses the monument's static, univocal nature with temporality and ambiguity.