THERE IS STILL MORE TO COME
Curated by Ivana Marjanović
FR 06.12.24
19:00 OPENING
Daniela Lanziner Mühlberger (Obfrau), Ivana Marjanović (Leitung), Masha Godovannaya (artist)
18:00 DOORS OPEN mit einer Führung durch die Ausstellung
Godovannaya's audio-visual productions explore themes of landscape, queerness, migration, auto\ethnography, and the everyday. Approaching art production through artistic research and collective action, Godovannaya's work predominantly consists of hybrid films in which hand-developed 16 mm material converges with digital video. Her documentary method incorporates sensual aesthetics, experimental cinema, queer relationality, and embodied ethics.
The exhibition echoes different moments from the artist’s transnational existence in a poetic, dreamy, ghostly, and realist way and reflects on the topics of love, motherhood, activism, collectivity, and the hauntedness of urban spaces and landscapes. Alongside Godovannaya's solo works, the show presents video and photo documentations and artifacts of the queer-feminist affinity art group “Unwanted Organisation” that she co-founded in 2015 in St. Petersburg (Russia).
Untitled #1
4 min., super 8 mm on video / video installation, b/w, music by Gianluca Porcu aka LU, 2005, Russia
In one of her earlier films, the artist captured an enchanting dance of a young girl on the streets of St. Petersburg, creating an ecstatic cinematic portrait. This film is an example of the “street photography” approach in Masha Godovannaya’s filmography and shares an unexpected encounter in an exceptionally vibrant manner. The artist writes: “while walking along Nevsky Prospect in St. Petersburg, Russia, I saw a young girl dancing this harsh, passionate, and seductive dance.” The experimental editing style with its quick changes and overlaying of film sequences – combined with the iterations of graceful dance movements, glimpses of passers-by, the urban surroundings, and the passionate music by Gianluca Porcu aka LU – all contribute to cinematically translating this accidental, intense everyday life experience of beauty, fascination, and freedom. The film was shot with a super 8 mm camera and hand-developed by the artist. The film was then projected onto the wall and recorded on video, creating a flickering effect. After, it was edited digitally. Untitled #1 marks a transition in Godovannaya’s work from film to video, and the beginning of her hybrid inter-media approach (until 2005, she had exclusively worked with film).
Only Two Words
10 min., digital video, color, sound, 2018, Russia/Austria
Eileen Myles, the iconic lesbian poet and writer of the New York literature scene since the 1970s, was invited to St. Petersburg for a poetry reading in May 2017, on the occasion of her book of poetry being the first to be translated into Russian. The event was held at a small book shop called Word Order and received an exceptional amount of attention, as it was at a moment when state homophobia in Russia was highly publicized. Myles’s public reading inspired Masha Godovannaya to make a film, which became a poetic audio-visual dialogue between two artists.
Godovannaya was an immigrant in New York in the 1990s herself and concocts a hybrid cinematic response to two of Myles’ poems. This is based on Godovannaya’s own memories and affective states, and on the North American tradition of underground cinema. The first poem, “Holes,” is about Eileen Myles’s experiences of internal migration from Boston to New York in the 1970s and the unfolding of new love relationships. The second one, “Bone,” is about going through the end of a romantic relationship and separation.
Eileen’s reading of the first poem is visually intertwined with images “borrowed” from two archives: Godovannaya’s 16 mm footage of New York from the 1990s, and found footage of New York from the 1970s. The visual story consists of rapidly interchanging shots of trains, city views from the train windows, impressions of different public spaces and private quarters, tiny portraits of friends, and the uncontrollable ephemera of film materiality itself.
While “Holes” is charged with energy (erotic, romantic, migratory, transitional…), “Bone” is more like a meditative visual farewell, a “love letter.” The poem read by Masha in Russian is accompanied by rhythmically slowed-down visuals interpreting Myles’s verses about the painful process of parting. The artist shares her intimate moments of loneliness at the Danube River in Vienna, which she overlays with shots of a lake in St. Petersburg where she and her ex-lover took their last walk together.
Water and the landscape in general play an important role in Godovannaya’s films and videos. A river can have a soothing and restorative effect as in Only Two Words. It can also be a metaphor for the rupture in time and disaster as in Debris of Dreams.
Debris of Dream
8 min., digital video, color, sound, 2018, Austria
Debris of Dreams takes the form of a video letter to her son Timothy in which Masha Godovannaya retells her nightmare. The film expresses an inner need to deal with fears, and traumas, and as a mediator for accepting loss and departure.
The artist begins the dream’s narration by sharing a moment of how she and her 6 or 7-year-old son went swimming one sunny day. The shots of the Danube riverside are interchanged calmly. Abruptly, the scenery becomes turbulent, and the dream becomes a nightmare in which the mother and the son become pulled by the current in the river. It seems that they are losing each other in wild debris carried by the swollen river…
This film relates to a biographical episode. After Masha Godovannaya enrolled in a postgraduate program in Vienna, her ex-husband and father of the son suddenly died. She found herself unexpectedly in a deep state of mourning, while at the same time facing separation from her teenage son, due to her precarious financial status in Vienna. As the artist writes: “The fear – maternal fear – of loss, departure, rupture with a child crawls into oneself bypassing safety mechanism. Haunted by the sensory unimaginable I employ images as a potential substitute for releasing the terror, as stand-ins for shattered senses.”
Debris of Dreams uses images of unruly nature and disquieted landscapes to translate daily anxiety into the uncanny dream world.
There Is Still More To Come
14 min., digital video, color, sound, music – Enrique Arriaga, 2024, Russia/Mexico
There Is Still More To Come is a filmic walk through St. Petersburg on June 5, 2022, when the Russian-Ukrainian war had been running at full scale for three and a half months. Although the film doesn’t show the images of the war, its haunted presence is felt everywhere that the artist goes with the camera. The visual effect of twisted reality is evoked by the simulation of a bifurcated gaze, created by overlapping footage shot by two cameras (a digital camera and a monochrome fuchsia camera).
The soundscape combines found recordings of police sirens and nuclear alarms, prisoner truck alarms, documents from the ongoing war, and field recordings of everyday life and random street conversations in St. Petersburg. These sounds are woven together with a carefully designed musical track composed by Mexican sound artist Enrique Arriaga. These elements together emphasize a state of “abnormal normality” where war is not “war,” but a “special military operation.”
This state is reinforced by the digital camera’s realist representation, which is then “overshadowed” by the pink-violet – fuchsia – image. The artist’s hand repeatedly covers the camera lens either to simulate a forced interruption of filming, or to reference the withdrawing the freedom of speech/image in a country or trying to protect us – viewers – from this intensified visual beauty.
The film material and the editing “reinforce the sense of a disjointed reality, spiraling anxiety, premonition of horror, and impending uncanny” as the artist writes. “Through an accentuated encounter of the visual and the sonic, the film-stroll becomes a direct speech of the narrator about what she distinctly heard and listened to in the reality of this walk - the unseen but unescapably sensed hauntings in the urban space.” (Masha Godovannaya)
***
The smaller room of the exhibition space presents artifacts and video works from the queer-feminist affinity art group “Unwanted Organization” (qfaag UO). Masha Godovannaya is a co-founding member, alongside other artists, poets, activists, and queer-feminist social researchers from St. Petersburg, Russia. .
In late 2015, the a grassroots initiative qfaag UO was formed as a reaction to a new law that V. Putin signed on May 23 of the same year. This law allows the Russian state to declare foreign and international organizations that are considered a threat to the country's security as “undesirable”/”unwanted,” and prohibit them from operating in Russia. This law also allows the prosecution of people who have had contact with these organizations.
The qfaag UO reclaimed and appropriated the pejorative name of the law as a playful prank voting for “unwanted” rather than “undesirable” in the group’s English title (since in Russian “нежелательная” could be translated as both “unwanted” and “undesirable.”) The group promotes a queer-feminist agenda and social solidarity and insists on artistic practices and collective engagements that counter Russian conservative internal politics.
Since September 2022, another wave of homophobic legal initiatives appeared, culminating in the ban on gender-affirming care in Russia on 24 July and the Supreme Court’s ruling the international LGBTQ movement to be "extremist", and outlawing it in the country on 30 November 2023.
Due to the current political situation in Russia, the ongoing war, and the various different geographical locations of its members, the qfaag UO is in the process of figuring out new strategies for communication, being in touch, and working together across borders, distances, and constant despair. The names of the group members are concealed and the materials presented in the exhibition are currently unavailable online due to security reasons.
The qfaag UO’s fugitive aesthetic practices, which range from lecture-performances to dramaturgy, “untheatre” and film, are based on subversion, humor, irony, the burlesque, and the grotesque. Queering Kitchen (2015) explores the kitchen as a place of collectivity, transgression, joy, and affection (and not as a space of isolation and domestic labor).
All power – to animals! (2016) and Ragged Bloc (2017) document performative interventions in public spaces as well as confrontations with the police and undercover agents during the official 1st of May demonstrations. In 2016 and 2017, these marches could still bring together different peoples from diverse social and political groups on Nevsky Prospect (conservatives, fascists, communists, Stalinists, democrats, socialists, anti-fascists, LGBTQ+s, feminists, sex workers, and many others). The qfaag UO’s videos are rare documents that capture the diversity of the Russian pre-full-scale-war society, and have audio-visually preserved and archived its public performative appearance for the future.
The material artifacts from the marches presented demonstrate the group’s DIY strategies concerning how to use language and body, show solidarity, and remain safe. “Since it’s getting more complicated to protect and fight for human rights in Russia, we decided to turn into animals” and “stitches, holes, and patches on our clothes will resemble dehiscent wounds on the body of the city” as some group's statements explain.
Text: Ivana Marjanović
Sources:
Masha Godovannaya, Queer Partisaning: Traces of Queer Relationality as Cinematic Errantry, PhD in Practice Dissertation, Manuscript. Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, 2023.
mashagodovannaya.wordpress.com
Archive of the qfaag UO website (formerly available online at faagunwanted.wordpress.com)
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Masha Godovannaya was born in Moscow and emigrated to the USA (New York) in 1995. Shortly after arriving, she joined the Anthology Film Archives, a vital hub of experimental cinema for film communities worldwide. After living in New York for seven years, she returned to St. Petersburg, Russia to continue her artistic work alongside parenting her son and teaching at different film and art institutions. At the end of 2015, she and a group of artists, activists, and social researchers from St. Petersburg co-founded a queer-feminist affinity art group “Unwanted Organisation.” This grassroots initiative promotes queer-feminist agendas in Russia and elsewhere through cultural and art productions and engagements. In 2016, she moved to Vienna, Austria, to attend the PhD-in-Practice program at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna. Since her graduation in 2023 she is based in Mexico.
Masha Godovannaya holds an MFA degree in Film/Video from Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Bard College, USA, an MA degree in Sociology from European University in St. Petersburg, Russia, and a PhD in Practice at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Austria.
Masha’s films and visual works have been shown at festivals and art venues such as the International Film Festival Rotterdam, International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, BFI London Film Festival, Ann Arbor International Film Festival, European Media Art Festival, Vienna Shorts Film Festival, Engauge Experimental Film Festival, Experiments in Cinema, Manifesta 10, 7th Liverpool Biennial, Tate Modern, Centre Georges Pompidou, The Ludwig Museum at the Russian Museum, and others. Masha’s works are distributed by Light Cone (Paris), The Collectif Jeune Cinéma (Paris), Filmmakers’ Cooperative (New York), and The CYLAND Video Archive (New York). These works are included in the collections of The State Russian Museum (St. Petersburg), and Österreichisches Filmmuseum (Vienna).
EVENTS DURING THE EXHIBITION PERIOD
EVENT
FR, 03.01.25, 17:00
KUNSTRAUM INNSBRUCK New Year's concert 2025
with Valerie Fritz
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