Pavel Zeldovich was developing this project in Moscow from 2021 until early 2022 when the Russian invasion of Ukraine forced him to leave his country and move to Berlin.

The project is a multi-genre series of digital prints and videos of urban daily life. Despite their apparent diversity, the paintings share a common theme: a set of endlessly repetitive actions. The situations depicted are not isolated moments in life, but rather parts of endlessly repeating cycles – day after day, year after year, generation after generation… Going to the grocery store, coming home from work, brushing their teeth in the morning, having a smoke on the balcony, surfing social networks on the phone – people do most of those things constantly and continuously. Repetitive Actions explores the idea of the hidden power of the „boring“ daily routine. The actions depicted in the paintings themselves are inconspicuous and trivial. But when triviality is repeated everywhere and uninterruptedly, it acquires tremendous power over our lives. Perhaps the most notable work of the project, School Class, an allusion to school group photo shoots, is, from the author’s point of view, an embodiment of this phenomena of repetitive action. Similar photographs are kept at home by almost every person on our planet. Despite changing generations of teachers and students, the strict, nearly totalitarian structure of school life remains unchanged.

There is another dimension to the project: the historical or, one might say, national. Made in Russia, Zeldovich’s works naturally reflect the urban life of Russia and the countries of the former Soviet Union. But phenomena and experiences depicted in these digital prints are universal and equally understandable to European, American, and Asian people.