The human memory functions in a way that resembles a chaotical channel switching. We are trying to recall our childhood experience and it appears as a flux of flashbacks: Disney cartoons, tough guys from the 1990s in action films and screenshots from the evening news stick together in our consciousness. Millions of people around the world born in the late 1980s and early 1990s were sitting in front of their TV sets every day and this practice cultivated mosaic thinking. But everyone has their own favorite heroes from mass-culture and sometimes it’s necessary to draw them from memory in order to understand who we have become.

In his series “Childhood in Front of TV Set” Slava Ptrk tries to reconsider the childhood memories of Soviet thirtysomething generation by combining footage from TV shows everyone has watched, archival materials and cartoons. For his debut at Urban Files he selected the work with Darkwing Duck and Danila Bagrov, a veteran of the Chechen conflict and the main character from the cult 1990s Russian criminal drama “Brat” (“Brother”). The location of each work of the series was carefully selected and this particular one is placed in the yard where the “Brat” movie was shot. The articulation of everyday life’s absurdity is the crucial approach of Slava’s practice.