The exhibition “The Space of Appearances: A Shared Tongue” is an excerpt from Yulia Spiridonova’s ongoing project “Wayward Son,” which examines the contemporary displacement of people from Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia, Armenia, and Central Asia. The individuals photographed in this body of work have in common the Russian language and the experience of leaving their respective home countries due to political repression, the gradual collapse of personal freedoms, the erosion of civic life and civil society, or war.
Photographs in the exhibition portray a Russian-speaking immigrant community in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, capturing moments of togetherness in informal, undefined spaces of comfort—where people talk, read, listen to music, daydream, or scroll on their phones. These encounters become what Hannah Arendt, in The Human Condition, calls “the space of appearances,” a threshold between the private and the public realms. These newly formed communities construct precisely such spaces: provisional and evanescent, yet undeniably vital. They offer ephemeral refuge from legal precarity, linguistic barriers, and the strain of family separation, as well as emotional solidarity, housing guidance, or simply the comfort of a familiar language.
Spiridonova’s use of light and shadow in her work creates a distance between the viewer and the subject, as most of her subjects are only partially revealed, hidden in shadows, turned away, blurred, as if they belong to another world of which one knows little to nothing. This photographic approach emphasizes the insularity of such communities, reminding an observer that such insularity can generate a deeper tension—between belonging in the present and lingering in the shadows of the past—often producing fragile, even artificial, feelings of togetherness.
“Wayward Son” holds displacement as a slow process of re-rooting—nonlinear, ungoverned, and never fully complete. The work simultaneously captures the courage required to rebuild life under tumultuous conditions and the melancholy that shadows it. To persist under displacement is itself a form of resistance—quiet, unglamorous, and continuous. It presses the question of whether adaptation is possible without concealment, and whether it is ever truly possible to outlive the world one was forced to leave behind.
“Space of Appearances” is on view at the Davis Center through Nov. 24, 2026.
Address: CGIS South, 1730 Cambridge St., 3rd floor, Cambridge, MA 02138
Questions? Email Laura A. Sargent at laura_sargent@fas.harvard.edu.
