Broken Knees by Irina Yulieva documents the performance of maturing. The characters’ movements are spontaneous, wild, and seemingly not connected to each other. A viewer sees in the photographs the broken (or is it cracking?) body language of kids, teenagers, middle-aged and elderly people. Maturing turns out to be a transitional state that may never end.
One can compare Yulieva’s project with a performance not only because photographs focus on the body and the gestures of impetuosity and protest. The photographer’s children, her father, a second cousin, an aunt, daughter’s friends and other residents of the Bolshoy Sabsk village, where Irina spent her childhood and later brought her children for the summer holidays, – all of them are taking part in a show that can be called, following the terminology of Richard Schechner, a ‘performance of everyday life’.