Haim Sokol

Haim Sokol (b. 1973) finds beauty and poignancy in the detritus of modern life. Having bartered with migrant workers for tubs and buckets discarded on building sites, Sokol takes these rusty tools and fills them with what he describes as “pictures of Russian life – dilapidated grey walls, dim light, garbage, the realities of a squalid existence and the impossibility of escape”. Looking to the past and Platonov’s description of the way people lived after the revolution, the dream to overcome the “nostalgia for the old life” and to build a new future for the proletariat, Sokol considers the continued impact of progress and unrelenting ambition on the most vulnerable in society.