Synchrodogs

Since 2008, Tania Shcheglova and Roman Noven, both Ukrainian artists, have been working together on the visual construction of a new reality which they have materialized into a total artistic project: Synchrodogs. Each new image pushes the boundaries of artistic mediums and disciplines. Their work in constant tension plays between reality and illusion, between the natural and the artificial, between the obvious and the unknown. Synchrodogs is definitely unclassifiable. At a time when images generated using artificial intelligence tools are invading the web, a quick glance at their production could mislead us. However, the two artists did not wait for the arrival of this technology to challenge reality. They have been creating their own reality for fifteen years. The only intelligence you will find in their creations is human, artistic, fallible. It would be illusory to consider the creation of Tania and Roman solely from the angle of photography. Their artistic process is total, while their works, filled with references to the major artistic movements of the last century, place them definitively in the continuity of the writing of our history of art.

Synchrodogs is above all a performative work. The duo has developed a meditation technique which has been an integral part of their creative process for around ten years. Today, they manage to capture a subtle moment between waking and sleeping, then write down what they just witnessed in their drowsiness, before recreating these visions through art. Their photographs are actually stagings of nocturnal dreams and visions coming directly from their subconscious minds. Working with their artistic subconscious is for them a way to have access to the most original and purest source of creation. Performance also manifests itself in their constant search for wild places in the four corners of the planet. By taking the body out of its comfort space, the duo performs the human body's capacity to perpetually push the limits of its natural habitat. Synchrodogs is also an ode to the body as an aesthetic motif. He strips himself naked, without becoming sexualized. The models' bare skin does not appear sensual, but rather vulnerable. It defines the shapes of bodies and allows itself to be buried under different materials, both natural and artificial. Having become simple subjects, men cease to be predators and blend into the elements, becoming one with the planet.

Synchrodogs' practice could be a continuation of Land Art, an artistic movement that appeared at the end of the 1960s in the United States, which considers the Earth and the landscape both as primary materials and surfaces of inscription. In reality, they deconstruct it, unravel the know-how of the previous century to offer a contemporary version aligned with the challenges of our time. Their work documents through images the new forms that the Earth takes as a result of human interventions in environmental processes. In “Inner Garden", the piece presented in the UNDER-expo exhibition, the central figure is a human being capable of finding harmony in nature, through escape and self-examination The work was created in the Carpathian Mountains of Ukraine, a place of power that is still undergoing constant transformation due to man's intrusion into nature. Synchrodogs is a call for collective responsibility. Halfway between the dream and the call for a human life more respectful of the planet that welcomes it, Synchrodogs creates an art of a new genre: “environmental surrealism."