WAR BY
OTH ER
NAM ES
a-summit-in-acts
ACT VII
Seventh Encounter
Cinémathèque Transversal
Alisa Lozhkina's 'Who Is Without Sin' with Peter Linebaugh and friends
Sunday April 17th, 2022
11AM Screening (EST)
12PM Assembling
Dear Friends and Comrades,
We hope you all are doing well.
We want to invite you this Sunday, as we continue our summit-in-acts, War By Other Names, with a special edition of our Cinémathèque Transversal.
Where does art, culture and the museum reside in the nexus of the many wars we are living and concurrently thinking through. Much is said and written about in terms of the colonial and racialized histories of museum collections. More still has been highlighted by decades of struggles against the museum as a site of state-making or capitalist white-washing. More recently, in our assemblies, we have been thinking through the museum, along with the university as integral parts of social infrastructures of white supremacy and coloniality.
If there are any utopian impulses which emerge in art and its infrastructures during or in the cross hairs of wars and revolutions, then clearly the palaces where the kings, queens, robber barons, oligarchs, colonial rulers have hidden their extracted and stolen loot are prime sites to reimagine not only arts’ potential destinies, but also a 'missing' peoples'.
If it seems a distant tangent to bring into dialogue these considerations regarding the destinies of art and its called for peoples in the midst of the Russian military invasion of Ukraine, then we should also consider that the queerest lines of flight are often the ones which open possibilities for pasts as well as futures not yet foreclosed.
So it is with this hope and intuition that we try to construct a conversation using a small gift, portal to a moment, offered by our very own Alisa Lozhkina, who has been deeply involved over these last weeks in caring for our assemblies.
Some weeks ago, Alisa Lozhkina wrote to us about a film she had made in 2014 entitled Who Is Without Sin?
"It is a documentary about the events that followed the Ukrainian revolution of 2013-2014. When our president Viktor Yanukovich fled the country, I was a deputy director and chief curator of a large museum in Kyiv. I gathered several other museum workers (all women) and we spent three weeks in Yanukovich's legendary luxurious palace -Mezhyhirja working side by side with soldiers and random people who occupied the place.
We were trying to save artworks that were abandoned there and prevent mass looting. It was a surreal experience and after that together with a friend, I curated an exhibition at the National Art Museum in Kyiv which featured the artworks and other items (mainly kitsch) from that collection. In parallel, I was filming people who came to that luxurious estate of a corrupt man just from the revolutionary barricades.
I documented how they changed and how the spirit of the corrupt owner of the house almost immediately haunted them. The logline of the movie was "Don't look for Yanukovich in Mezhyhirja, look for him in your heart". This movie was never "on time' for Ukraine. First I was told that I was casting a shadow on the Ukrainian revolution. Then the war started in the Donbas and I got scared that I might accidentally ruin the reputation of my heroes, many of whom went to fight."
So for this upcoming Sunday, we invite you to join us and help try to think this moment through another one documented by Alisa - raising both questions of the destinies of art as well as the dispossessed and missing peoples it is always intrinsically conjoined to.
You are invited to either watch the film on your own time
or
for those who would like to still watch a film with others, we will 'screen it' also at 11am (EST) just prior to Sunday's assembly which will begin at 12pm (EST).
Dear Friends,
We hope you all are doing well.
We want to invite you this Sunday, as we continue our summit-in-acts, War By Other Names, with a special edition of our Cinémathèque Transversal.
Where does art, culture and the museum reside in the nexus of the many wars we are living and concurrently thinking through. Much is said and written about in terms of the colonial and racialized histories of museum collections. More still has been highlighted by decades of struggles against the museum as a site of state-making or capitalist white-washing. More recently, in our assemblies, we have been thinking through the museum, along with the university as integral parts of social infrastructures of white supremacy and coloniality.
If there are any utopian impulses which emerge in art and its infrastructures during or in the cross hairs of wars and revolutions, then clearly the palaces where the kings, queens, robber barons, oligarchs, colonial rulers have hidden their extracted and stolen loot are prime sites to reimagine not only arts’ potential destinies, but also a 'missing' peoples'.
If it seems a distant tangent to bring into dialogue these considerations regarding the destinies of art and its called for peoples in the midst of the Russian military invasion of Ukraine, then we should also consider that the queerest lines of flight are often the ones which open possibilities for pasts as well as futures not yet foreclosed.
So it is with this hope and intuition that we try to construct a conversation using a small gift, portal to a moment, offered by our very own Alisa Lozhkina, who has been deeply involved over these last weeks in caring for our assemblies.
Some weeks ago, Alisa Lozhkina wrote to us about a film she had made in 2014 entitled Who Is Without Sin?
"It is a documentary about the events that followed the Ukrainian revolution of 2013-2014. When our president Viktor Yanukovich fled the country, I was a deputy director and chief curator of a large museum in Kyiv. I gathered several other museum workers (all women) and we spent three weeks in Yanukovich's legendary luxurious palace -Mezhyhirja working side by side with soldiers and random people who occupied the place.
We were trying to save artworks that were abandoned there and prevent mass looting. It was a surreal experience and after that together with a friend, I curated an exhibition at the National Art Museum in Kyiv which featured the artworks and other items (mainly kitsch) from that collection. In parallel, I was filming people who came to that luxurious estate of a corrupt man just from the revolutionary barricades.
I documented how they changed and how the spirit of the corrupt owner of the house almost immediately haunted them. The logline of the movie was "Don't look for Yanukovich in Mezhyhirja, look for him in your heart". This movie was never "on time' for Ukraine. First I was told that I was casting a shadow on the Ukrainian revolution. Then the war started in the Donbas and I got scared that I might accidentally ruin the reputation of my heroes, many of whom went to fight."
So for this upcoming Sunday, we invite you to join us and help try to think this moment through another one documented by Alisa - raising both questions of the destinies of art as well as the dispossessed and missing peoples it is always intrinsically conjoined to.
You are invited to either watch the film on your own time
or
for those who would like to still watch a film with others, we will 'screen it' also at 11am (EST) just prior to Sunday's assembly which will begin at 12pm (EST).
_____________________________________
Who Is Without Sin?
by Alisa Lozhkina
Link to Introduction
http://16beavergroup.org/summit/lozhkina_treasures_of_mezhyhirya.pdf
Link to Film
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIG1MYsfq68