Ieva Epnere / Katrina Neiburga / Anastasia Sosunova

Demikhov Dog  by Anastasia Sosunova reviews Soviet scientific utopias in a humoristic manner by reactivating the invention – a dog with two heads – of the scientist Vladimir Demikhov, a pioneer of organ transplants. Not unlike contemporary technological projects, this hypothesis also characterised by a zany, even magical and mythological dimension. 

In Four Edges of Pyramiden, Ieva Epnere returns to an abandoned nuclear base in Spitsbergen. Created in the 1940s as a showcase for the Soviet system, it is currently a non-place where the voices of locals present so many attitudes with regard to history, in a majestic natural setting which, independently of historical decline, pays homage to the power of a mystical space that is naturally resistant to all forms of civilisation. 

With Magic Things, Katrina Neiburga presents a post-pop "horror film", a parody of consumer society as the heart of the marital dream, making disposable material culture into a new "social" religion of the post-communist world. Her video entitled Topology n. 29 is presented as a slide show of still images shot in slow motion, a clinical voyage into the intimacy of an abandoned apartment, proposing an absurd and agonised narrative of the material accumulation of a whole existence. 

The role of things also haunts Messed up Terrains by Anastasia Sosunova in a more contemporary meditation on the role of technology in the dematerialisation of human relations and the perpetuation of historical community divisions. 

With gravity and humour, they each review the ideological and territorial violence of the communist system, but also the narrative potential it offers.