“Mind the Step” is an artist’s attempt to deal with one of the most devastating man-made tragedies of the twentieth century – the Soviet Gulag. In contrast to literature, this subject has almost no presence in visual art produced during either the Soviet or post-Soviet period. When there were visual records, they largely came from those who passed through the Gulag. Whatever the reasons for this jarring lacuna, Russia did not have its own Anselm Kiefer, who could confront his country’s dark past in an artistically powerful way, although the Gulag destroyed several millions of innocent human lives. While addressing the subject cannot do enough justice to the atrocities, every attempt to do so is still necessary especially in light of the disturbing rise of Stalinist admirers in contemporary Russia. With its somewhat imperative and inviting title, Jari Silomaki’s project “Mind the Step” is one possible way to deal with the tragedy. In a personal and empathic way, Silomaki offers a reflection on the catastrophe from the perspective of the neighboring country, Finland, whose people also became victims of the events. The artist’s core performative gesture is rather minimalistic in character and symbolically unrealistic in scale: to make one step for each known or unnamed victim lying in mass graves, while visiting the original sites of the massacre. The Mind the Step builds on and significantly expands the artist’s previous project, series of photographs “We Are the Revolution” (2008–2013), which is now part of the KIASMA collection. The project will employ various documenting media, including video, photography, text and sound, and its different conceptual parts will be presented in Finland and Russia between 2018–2022.  –Andrey Shabanov