Russia and South Africa: A weird, wonderful friendship - Review

With a “focus on Russia”, the Embassy for the Russian Federation has partnered with NAF to bring a host of films and speakers as well as a photographic exhibition by Mikhail Petrakov, the Russian Ambassador to South Africa.

This exhibition sparked interest since it featured Moscow, Robben Island and the Cape Wheel, three seemingly incongruous subjects.

Well that is exactly what they are, incongruous.

The collection of photos of Moscow were beautiful, but still, Moscow in the winter is not particularly original stuff.

The photos did move on to less freezing images of the city. While the photographer clearly wanted to broaden the scope of representations of Russia these brought to mind the early work of Rhodes photojournalism students.

Then it got a bit odd: the next set of images showed “Robben Island as the prisoners might’ve seen it”. In the end, it included a whole lot of stock standard touristy Robben Island images which almost looked like the original images’ negatives.

This part was meant to relate to the friendship between South Africa and Russia and how the Ambassador clearly has love for both countries.

The next set of photos were of the Cape Wheel. For those who have not yet been to Cape Town the Cape Wheel is a mini-London eye. It is the feature of every Capetonian and tourists’ Instagram feed and can’t be considered anything special to Cape Town (especially since it has been shipped all around the world for various events)

This article first appeared on Cue Media.