[29.3.2018 Ilya Budraitskis & Dimitri Venkov]

DISCUSSION & SCREENING of KRISIS (2016) | 29.3.2018 LOCATION: KONE FOUNDATION’S KAMARI / TEHTAANKATU 21 B 5th floor 17:30-19:30

Screening of the film Krisis (2016) by Dimitri Venkov followed by a discussion with Ilya Budraitskis who has invited Venkov to participate on the event on the occasion of Budraitskis' residency in Helsinki International Artist programme (HIAP).

”Today, decades after collapse of the USSR, the ghost of the "Soviet past", still dominates the public discourse in Russia. While one side it used to justify the present policy of the government, liberal intellectuals believes that this Past remains an obstacle for the "normal" democratic development of the country. The debates on "de-communization" sparked again after the start of Ukrainian crisis in 2014. Dmitry Venkov's film presents a picture of this debates in Russian blogosphere and gives an opportunity to discuss not just a Russian or Ukrainian case, but the contemporary phenomena of "politics of memory" in general: how the homogenous notions of the Past dominates the Present and what is wrong with the very concept of "anachronism", which prevents the contemporaneousness to be completed?”

As a reference a text by Ilya Budraitskis published in e-flux: http://www.e-flux.com/journal/70/60563/the-eternal-hunt-for-the-red-man/

Krisis (2016) is based on a facebook discussion among Russian and Ukrainian artists, which took place in December 2013 upon the tear-down of the statue of Lenin in Kiev during the early stages of the Maidan protests.

Ilya Budraitskis is a historian and curator based in Moscow, Russia. He is on the editorial boards of several print and online publications, including Moscow Art Magazine and LeftEast. For now he is lecturing in the Moscow High School for Social and Economic Sciences and the Institute for Contemporary Art. With Ekaterina Degot and Marta Dziewanska, Budraitskis co-edited and authored the book Post-Post-Soviet?: Art, Politics and Society in Russia at the Turn of the Decade (University of Chicago Press, 2013). His book Dissidents among dissidents (FMP press, Moscow, 2017) was recently awarded the Andrei Bely prize.

Dimitri Venkov is a filmmaker working across art, film, and academic institutional contexts. His works have been presented at Documenta 14, Vth Moscow Biennale, First Bergen Assembly, Kino der Kunst, Oberhausen, and other exhibitions and film festivals. In 2012 he received the Young Artist Kandinsky Prize for his film Mad Mimes. Dimitri is a professor of video art at Moscow Rodchenko School of Photography and Multimedia and has lectured at Yale and Moscow State Universities.

The event is a part of a research project dealing with questions of information distribution and knowledge formation especially in relation with contemporary Russia supported by Kone Foundation and curated by Miina Hujala and Arttu Merimaa in connection with Connecting Points-programme in HIAP (Helsinki International Residency programme).