Commissioned
by the Cisneros Fontanals Foundation (CIFO), Miami, 2006.Premiered at
the
exhibition "10 Defining Experiments: cifo 2006 Grant Program Recipients,"
Oct- Nov 2006.
"Leningrad Trilogy," presents three distinct paths to travel across St Petersburg, considering public space, Soviet Era monuments and architecture as markers of its history. The work is composed of three narrative videos each of which focuses on Saint Petersburg as a contested city, a site of confronted ideologies, a literary muse and a witness of political victory and defeat.
"Leningrad”
(rt: 8 min., B&W, sound, 2006), is a meditation on the Leningrad that
witnessed years of political repression during Stalin’s terror.
Readings of two important poems: Anna Akhmatova’s Petrograd, 1919
and Osip Mandelstam’s Leningrad (1930) serve as audio companions
to a contemplative video montage shot in contemporary St Petersburg.
“Leningrad,
Petrograd, Petersburg (Part 1)” (44 min., color, sound)
is a before-and-after look at landmark cityscapes, based on a 1954 government-published
book of photographs of the city. Visiting the city 52 years later, I re-photographed
each of these locations, revealing changes to Soviet monuments and architecture.
The accompanying voiceover is a recorded conversation between curator
Elena Sorokina, artist Yevgeniy Fiks, and myself in which we respond to
the images and the many political, historical and cultural aspects that
these invoke. Thirty-six of the location pairings are also made as photographic
diptychs, which show a wide spectrum of degree of change over time.
"Leningrad,
Petrograd, Petersburg (part 2)" (rt: 40 min., color, sound, 2006)
presents a series of interviews held around St Petersburg’s two
most prominent Soviet Monuments to V.I Lenin. The interviewees respond
to a series of questions that attempt to investigate the public perception
of these heroic Soviet monuments and how they affect the contemporary
landscape of the city fifteen years after the fall of the Soviet Union.
