The Hymns of Muscovy
The film is a trip to the planet Muscovy, which is an upside down space twin of the city of Moscow. As the title of the work suggests, the journey also takes us back in time. Gliding along the surface of the planet, we look down to the sky and see historic architectural styles fly by - the exuberant Socialist Classicism aka Stalinist Empire, the laconic and brutish Soviet Modernism, and the hodgepodge of contemporary knock-offs and revivals of the styles of the past. An essential companion to this journey through time and space are Hymnic Variations on the Soviet anthem by the composer Alexander Manotskov. The anthem was written in 1943 and has undergone three editions of lyrics yet musically remained unchanged to now serve as the official anthem of the Russian Federation. Manotskov used an early recording of the anthem as source material to create three electronic variations each corresponding to an architectural style. As if, in a twist of Goethe’s phrase, architecture plays its frozen music. Look closely, can you hear it? 14 min, HD video 2018 Film by Dimitri Venkov
Krisis
Krisis is a based on a facebook discussion among Russian and Ukrainian artists, which took place in December 2013 upon the tear-down of the Lenin statue in Kiev during the Maidan protests. As is now clear, the discussion unfolds at a pivoting point in history. In fact, it occurs at the very moment when history bursts into the scene as a force surpassing individual actors. Krisis should also be understood here as trial or judgment, where twelve jurors debate the meaning of the historical event but fail to pass a verdict. Just as with Pilate’s judgment of Jesus, the decision is not reached and the trial takes on “a continuous and implacable course, an incessant passing and progress through time” (Agamben, "Pilate and Jesus"). The historical crisis is bound to last like trauma in psychoanalysis: separated from its original context, it is bound to reappear in pathological forms in any sphere and at any moment. 32 min, HD video 2016 Film by Dimitri Venkov
Mad Mimes
An anthropological study of a cargo cult in a marginalized commune living next to the Moscow Ring Road and survived mainly on roadside trash. Although the road provided for their basic needs, the subsistence of the commune was extremely precarious and highly dependent on the roadway's fluctuations. This dependency led them to develop a cargo cult of the road. 30 min, SD video 2012 Film by Dimitri Venkov
Like The Sun
The film draws upon the utopias of the 1960s. Poised between idealization and self-parody, the awkward narratives of the future from communes to space colonisation to situationists' New Urbanism are enacted in the form of a theater play, a psychogeographical dérive, and a game-like quest. Today, when the future has arrived without the vitality of its visions, the protagonists of the film set out on a mission to create a new culture from the ingredients of withered utopias. 60 min, HD video 2013 Film by Dimitri Venkov
America
Conspiracy theories arise in situations of political defeat or impotency. For example, the idea of a Masonic conspiracy arose during the French Revolution in clerical and conservative circles. However, in a certain historical situation, the source of a conspiracy imagination is the state itself. Perceiving its vulnerability, the authorities institutionalize myths of foreign agents and saboteurs acting in the interests of enemy powers. Such discourse has serious implications, as it blurs boundaries between fact and fiction. How can art oppose the machine of state propaganda?Perhaps by constructing its own definitive conspiracy theory.
Hot And Cold
Before the times of momentous change, when the resources of rationality are in crisis and categories considered common sense are being deconstructed, the transformative energy of the people’s fury and despair brings into play charismatic characters who operate with the dark forces of irrationality. At the dusk of empires renegades, adventurers, conspirators, and quasi-religious leaders seek to instrumentalise imperial symbolism while perverting its very essence. Tyrants, in fear of these people’s attempts at the status quo, respond by repressing them. Such are the cases of Pussy Riot’s prayer and a Yakutian shaman’s march on the Kremlin to cast Putin out of it: Pussy Riot being sentenced to a two-year jail term and the shaman forcefully placed in a psychiatric ward long before making it to the Kremlin. The protagonist of the film arrives to the presidential suite in a hotel near the Kremlin to perform a ritual. There he weds a pike who, being a character of Russian folk tales, discloses the secret knowledge of aquatic cum agrarian symbolism of the Soviet coat of arms leading him to reconstruct it with the ears of wheat, crawfish shells, and an amorphous blub in place of the globe. 15 min, 4K video 2020 Film by Lana Hollis
Valentine One Blue Eye
Experimental film inspired by Instagram aesthetics. I recreate the hallucinatory logic of obsessive dreams using unexpected associations, multiple personalities of the zombie ex-boyfriends mixing them with my character and replaying over and over as in a dream. 3 min, HD video 2021 Film by Lana Hollis
The Chinese Room of Alan Turing
Short film on dietary cybernetics