Cinema of Repeat Film
2015

Panorama Cinema Pavilion at VDNKh (Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art Special Project)
Curated by Alexandra Paperno, Ekaterina Inozemtseva, Natalia Nusinova
September 22nd – November 1st, 2015

Installation. 11 Flags. Polyester silk, acrylic

Eleven red flags are installed on flagpoles located around the entire perimeter of the facade of the Circular Kinopanorama. A red flag appears on the mast of the battleship at the end of Sergei Eisenstein’s film Battleship Potemkin. To make the flag appear red on the ship’s mast in the black-and-white silent film, the editors had to colour in a large number of the film frames. The red flags on the facade of the Circular Kinopanorama have also been coloured manually in an expressive manner. The 11 repetitions of the flag’s colouring create a sensation of moving film frames. The eleven flag frames accord the old cinema a similarity to the celebrated battleship in the film, no longer sailing through the lines of enemy ships as in in Eisenstein’s film, but instead through time.

Exhibition view at VDNKh Circular Kinopanorama Pavilion (Moscow), photo by Yuri Palmin

Suspense, 2014-2015. Acrylic and rice paper on canvas, 3 paintings, 120×160 cm each
Exhibition views by Yuri Palmin

“God is the ‘infinitely distant man.” — Edmund Husserl The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology

Alexandra sees interiors as deserted as the ones captured by the camera of Alfred Hitchock, freezing time in endless and anxious expectation – suspense. When portraying the interiors presented in her three-picture frame series, Alexandra shifts the perspective, creating the effect of vertigo. In the films of the mid-1950s, Hitchcock diverged from Hollywood’s gold standard, which prescribed combining the perspective of the camera with that of the director and viewer, and instead transmitted to the camera the perspective of the actor who is feeling dizzy. Paperno presents us with such a perspective for examination, which changes our gravitational settings: she does not represent, but instead places us inside these almost flat images.

Cinema of Repeat Film
VDNKh, Moscow, 22.09 – 01.11.2015
http://www.triumph-gallery.ru/en/events/cinema-repeat-film.html