Lost Territories: Tracing Imperial Violence

FOTODOK presents Lost Territories: Tracing Imperial Violence, a group exhibition by Sputnik Photos, an internationally renowned collective of photographers based in Poland. For nearly twenty years, Sputnik’s work has explored the social, cultural, and political transformations of the former Eastern Bloc, with a focus on East-Central Europe and Central Asia.

Why now?

Our collaboration with Sputnik Photos began eleven years ago, when, after several years of working nomadically, an exhibition of the collective’s work marked the very first show at FOTODOK’s current space. That moment in March 2014 was a pivotal one: just days earlier, on the 20th February, Russia had begun its occupation of the Crimean Peninsula in Ukraine. Since then, the war has escalated into a full-scale invasion and one of Europe’s largest humanitarian crises, its brutality growing over time: Russia has repeatedly targeted civilian infrastructure, carried out forced deportations, and committed acts of ecocide. With a shared commitment to actively support Ukraine, our organisations felt it was urgent to join forces again. This time, we look closely into the histories of several regions affected by Russian imperial violence, examining the context that has shaped today’s reality.

Michał Łuczak, from Yangiobod, New City, 2017

Agnieszka Rayss, Postcards from the War, Postcard no 7 2025

What can visitors expect?

Lost Territories: Tracing Imperial Violence brings together recent bodies of work by six members of the collective: Jan Brykczyński, Karolina Gembara, Michał Łuczak, Rafał Milach, Adam Pańczuk, and Agnieszka Rayss. In parallel, it revisits Sputnik Photos’ long-term Lost Territories project—an ever-growing, unfinished archive developed over the past nearly two decades. Finally, FOTODOK and the collective have also invited Ukrainian artist Maria Matiashova to contribute her work EMPIRE EXPIRE to the presentation.

The Russian Empire, followed by the Soviet Union and today’s Russian Federation, has long employed colonial strategies of violence, exploitation, and extraction. While this exhibition does not aim to present an all-encompassing picture of those processes, it highlights instead a selection of stories that reveal the continuity of imperial violence from the past into the present. In Yangiobod, for instance, Michał Łuczak explores the transformation of a mining city in Uzbekistan—once one of the Soviet Union’s main uranium extraction sites, which is essential for the creation of nuclear weapons. Russia alone inherited this nuclear arsenal after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, supporting its subsequent military aggression. In Postcards from the War by Agnieszka Rayss, the artist combines images of Soviet postcards with contemporary war photography from Ukraine, pointing to how propaganda was used to shape a “happy” image of a society that, in reality, was a long way from peace.