Conversations about "The Common Sensuos" in Berlin

Moving images by
eeefff | Dana Kavelina | Sashko Protyah | Mykola Ridnyi
and conversations with
Yevgenia Belorusets | eeefff (Dzina Zhuk and Nicolay Spesivtsev) | Olexii Kuchanskyi | Mykola Ridny | Elena Vogman

Patriarchal regimes of military conflicts and their mediation produce spaces where binary logic of enemy and victim, self and other, present and future, national and personal appear inevitable. Sensory perception is subjected to linear coordinates which henceforth embed our existential territories within these polarities. Today, more than a year after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, common mental environments have forcibly become a battlefield of information warfare and cognitive combat. Images that mediate the militarized field toxify our mental environments with shadows of personal guilt, despairing isolation in cages of identity, and eschatological imaginaries, erasing all common paths out of the totalizing condition of war.

Is there a way to create a sensuous economy beyond the singular or individual perception? The moving-image program attempts to explore experimental artistic approaches to the common sensuous by tracing alternative routes of desire, dancing circuits between memory and imagination, and the melted boundaries between the sensed and the sensing.

Whereas There Are no Monuments to Monuments (Dana Kavelina, 2021) sets up a pseudo-reportage form to reveal the sensory memory and misplaced associations surrounding the stone bodies of Kyiv’s monuments, No! No! No! (Mykola Ridnyi, 2017) explores the relations between popular digital images and the mental cyclones of the front line’s proximity to Kharkiv, which has recently experienced the most intense fighting. Tactical Forgetting (eeefff, 2023) offers a critical artistic observation on the gamified perception of the Revolution in Belarus (2020-2021) as well as on the corresponding management of attention and administration of memory. The work is based on documentary materials drawn from a large Minsk corporation whose activities focus on creating computer games with military themes. The Film of Sand (Sashko Protyah, 2019) investigates the intersections between war and intimacy, threat and empathy, fiction and documentation, combining intercepted homophobic audio messages from the Russian army with images of a fictional grassroot hook-up app for the eastern Ukrainian gay community.

Programme curated by
Olexii Kuchanskyi | Elena Vogman

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