Niels Ackermann

Since the 2014 revolution, almost a quarter century after the demise of the USSR, the Ukrainian government has sought to erase any trace of its Soviet past by launching the first wave of decommunization to remove all symbols related to the former regime. For two years, Niels Ackermann and Sébastien Gobert (France, 1985) searched for vanished statues of Lenin. They photographed seventy dismantled, diverted or recontextualized statues and collected as many interviews with their keepers or owners. Presented at Espace Images, the Looking for Lenin series unfolded into a documentary-inventory mixing unusual images and ambivalent accounts.