"Hyperborea" presents unforgettable visual tales of life in the Siberian Arctic that Evgenia Arbugaeva knew when she was growing up in Tiksi, a town on the shore of the Laptev Sea in the Republic of Yakutia. Her work discloses both the fragility and beautiful desolation of the land and those who inhabit it, and her rigorously composed photographs glow with rich otherworldly color, bristle with the raw vibrancy of the climate, and exhibit the quiet intensity of lives borne out in seclusion and extremes.
This photobook contains a decade of work, with photographs selected from across the full range of Arbugaeva’s series and extensive travels across the Russian Arctic coast to connect with people living in these remote and inhospitable places.
The photographs that she brings back from her long-term visits convey a world where everything seems connected: humans and nature, the sky and the land. An elemental space of deep solitude and slower pace of life. Her images invite us to contemplate a territory that has been a place of longing and imagination for many, which is now under existential threat from a multitude of environmental changes.
With an introduction by anthropologist Piers Vitebsky, four texts by Arbugaeva to supplement the images, and a specially commissioned map to provide a sense of where Arbugaeva’s work is located.