Triumph Gallery (Moscow)

An allegorical three-part film about three types of utopia

The virtual world generated by the real world of the twentieth century is growing exponentially, like an organism in a Petri dish. Crossing its own borders in to new zones, it absorbs its founders and mutates in to something absolutely new. In this new world real wars look like a game on americasarmy.com. Prison torture appears more like the sadistic exercises of modern-day valkyries. Technologies and materials transform the artificial environment in to a fantasy landscape of a new epoch. This paradise is a mutated world where time is frozen and the past is neighbor to the future.

Dimitri Venkov’s Krisis is based on a Facebook discussion on December 8, 2013, the day on which pro-European demonstrators in Kiev started to demolish statues of Vladimir Lenin. The film reenacts debates between Russian and Ukrainian artists during the protests, revealing deep aesthetic, historical, and political divisions.