Anna Engelhardt, Mark Cinkevich
Onset
Exhibition
7–24 March 2023
Aksioma | Project Space, Ljubljana
Part of Tactics & Practice #14: Scale
A demon roams through an ominous synthetic environment, reconstructed from satellite images of Russian air bases: Khmeimim in Syria, Baranovichi in Belarus, and Belbek in Ukraine. This parasitic force pervades the air bases, passing through their deserted corridors, interrogation rooms and electricity substations. Devastation follows in its wake. In this single-channel video installation, Engelhardt and Cinkevich use an unholy alliance of medieval demonology, open-source intelligence and CGI animation to uncover the hidden life of these military outposts. Over the course of the film, the true horror of Russian colonialism becomes manifest in the process of possession – the imposition of external control that gradually destroys an organism from within.
THE AUTHORS
Anna Engelhardt is the alias of a media artist, researcher and writer. Her practice examines post-Soviet cyberspace through a decolonial lens, with an overarching aim of dismantling Russian imperialism. These investigations take on multiple forms of media, including video, software and hardware interfaces. Engelhardt also pursues lecturing and publishing to situate digital conflicts within a broader colonial matrix. Her works and activities have been featured at the transmediale festival, Venice Architecture Biennial, Ars Electronica and the Kyiv Biennial, as well as in Digital War and The Funambulist.
Mark Cinkevich (1994, Lahoysk) is a Belarus-born interdisciplinary researcher and artist based in Warsaw. Having received his master’s degree in Cultural Studies from the University of Helsinki, he now pursues a PhD at the Department of Anthropology, University of Warsaw. In his practice, he is interested in critical, speculative and experimental aspects of art that operate at the intersection of fact and fiction. His work focuses on the post-Soviet infrastructural and social landscape, through which he explores in particular the concepts of nuclear colonialism, infrastructural colonialism, extractivism and monstrosity.
CREDITS
Authors: Anna Engelhardt, Mark Cinkevich
Production of the exhibition:
Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana, 2023
Part of the series:
Tactics & Practice
Supported by:
the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia and the Municipality of Ljubljana
The project is a co-commission of transmediale festival, Pro Helvetia foundation, and Henie Onstad Kunstsenter
RELATED ACTIVITIES
LECTURE PERFORMANCE
Infrastructural Horror: Soaring, Sprawling, Vast. As part of the conference Shifting Scales ↔ panel The Optimising Gaze and its Demons
WORKSHOP
Investigation as a Medium: Open-Source Intelligence for Artists
ALUO, Tobačna 5, Ljubljana
8 March 2023, 2 PM–5 PM