Top:
Things begin to enter Vladimir’s face.
He tries to call his mother, but she is dead.
Roee Rosen, Vladimir’s Night, number 18, 2012
Bottom: the coat of arms of Birobidzhan, the Jewish oblast established by Stalin; Aleksander Rodchenko and Vladimir Mayakovsky, a poster advertising Red October cookies, 1923
Video, 34 minutes, 2010
Out presents a domination/ submission scene set in a mundane living room. The increasing pain prompts the sub to spew out not only cries of pleasure and pain, but also sentences. The scene thus connotes both confessions under torture, and rituals of exorcism, even as it remains a documentation of willful pleasure, being that both participants are not actresses, but members of the Israeli BDSM community.The demon who speaks through the sub, is and isn’t herself. In fact, the sentences are all quotes of Israel’s minister of foreign affairs, Avigdor Lieberman, one of the most extreme right wing politicians in Israel.
The ritual is framed by two scenes. A preceding interview with the two participants seems at the beginning to be a straightforward documentary, but transforms into an exposition of the narrative premise by which one is possessed, the other an exorcist. The final musical scene is a song set to the words of the Russian poet Esenin’s Letter to Mother. Executed as a one-shot, the song is a direct, if twisted, homage to the final scene of another film that deals with radical sexuality and politics: Dusan Makavejev’s WR, The Mystery of the Organism.
Awards:
Orizzonti award, best medium-length film, The 67th Venice Film Festival
ARTE Award for best European film, Oberhausen Kurzfilmtage
First prize, Bucharest International Experimental Film Festival
Official nomination for the European Academy Awards, Sarajevo Film Festival
Special mention, CPH:DOX
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23
Now that the dog is dead,
The little pitchfork wants to be Vladimir’s best friend.
He shoves his head between the boy’s buttocks and explores:
Such big cucumbers they sell these days in stores!
Maxim Komar-Myshkin, Vladimir’s Night # 23
Out, stills from the video, 2010
Out, stills from the video, 2010
Out, stills from the video, 2010
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21
Vladimir’s belly is filled with complicated matter,
You cannot find a pin within that serpentine intestine pile.
Do not despair, dear Diner’s Club, American Express and Master-
Card, soon Vladimir will be disemboweled.
Maxim Komar-Myshkin, Vladimir’s Night # 21
The Death of Cattelan, Mixed media on paper, 16 pages (complete dossier as PDF)
The narrator tells of his wife’s disappearance and Maurizio Cattelan’s demise, while they were set to preview an art project realized in a Pygmy village in Congo. The story is told by circling letters in texts culled from different sources, from books to news items published as the work was made, and so, the reader encounters two different narratives on each page. A change of the circles’ color indicates a new word.
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The Death of Cattelan, Chapter 4, Mixed media on paper, 2011
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The Death of Cattelan, chapter 13, mixed media on paper, 2011
Hilarious Hani 1-3, gouache portraits of Hani Furstenberg made for T shirts worm by audience members in Hilarious, 2010
Video, 21 minutes, 2010
Hilarious is set to examine the possibility of dysfunctional humor and laughter stirred when there is no reason to laugh. Hilarious presents a stand up monologue of a female comedian performing live in front of a studio audience. If humor is a mechanism set to cope in particular ways with disturbing, sometimes forbidden topics, this performance not only offsets these structures through their failure, but also offers a different manifestation of these topics, left exposed without the guise of laughter.
Hilarious, 21 minutes, 2010
