August 19, 1991, is not simply a historical date that has been assigned to the August Putsch, it is an epochal event and a turning point in the country's history. It is first and foremost a personal story for everyone who was born back in the old world. And for each of us, it means something different. However, art is able to transform individual experience into an artistic image that can bring viewers together in shared contemplation and experience.
Behind every work of art there is always the story of its creator. The group Inspection Medical Hermeneutics originated in 1987 from the friendship of three artists: Pavel Pepperstein, Sergey Anufriev and Yuri Leiderman. In 1991, in the place of Yuri Leiderman, Vladimir Fedot Fedorov joined the team. Existing until 2001, they themselves became an artefact of an era woven of contradictions from the 1990s, which, lacking the inner integrity of an era subject to a unified logic of historical development, represented a kind of historical gap, a transition from the old to the new that stretched over a decade. It is unequivocally a very rich period for the new Russia, combining pause, rapid development, reflection on the past and the formation of the new. This paradoxical and elusive process of change is precisely what Inspection Medical Hermeneutics has managed to capture in its work.
