For more than fifteen years, I – as an artist – have been actively collecting materials such as photos, videos, catalogues, booklets and invitation cards on the activities of contemporary artists from Moscow. From 1989 until today, I have collected information on over 120 exhibitions of Russian art in the West. This material is unique, especially if one considers the fact that it documents an important period, namely the appearance of contemporary Russian culture in the West after the Perestroika. This gives rise to the question that is most important to me: how should I conserve all of this material? The first, most natural path is to continue collecting material in the hope that with time, Russian culture will become interested in
VIDEO DOCUMENTATION OF CONTEMPORARY MOSCOW ARTISTS
EXHIBITS IN THE WEST 1989–2007
Camera / Director: Vadim Zakharov
The video archive contains material on the activities of contemporary Moscow artists in the West from 1989 to 2003 and will continue to grow in the future. More than 100 exhibits have been filmed thus far. The archive represents a private undertaking by the artist Vadim Zakharov and can be considered an element of his creative activity. Part of the material has been filmed in a haphazard, hurried and incomplete manner. The other part has been filmed in a bureaucratically meticulous way. It would seem that each time, at various moments in the process of filming, one side of the “artist-archivist” dilemma prevailed over the other. Vadim Zakharov begs forgiveness of those whose material he happened to have encountered in his state as an “artist,” and welcomes expressions of gratitude from those who happened to have been filmed while he was in his “bureaucratic documentalist” mode.
Family travels - video Documentation of traveling
Contemporary Moscow Artists’
Exhibits in the West 1989–2007
Camera / Director: V. Zakharov
Camera / Director: Vadim Zakharov
Cover of the video edition Artist, dedicated to Mikhail Roginsky and Eduard Shteinberg. The first film was recorded by V. Zakharov in Roginsky’s studio in Paris, 27 min. 2000. The second film was recorded in Tarusa, in Shteinberg’s summer house, DVD, 41 min. 2001
FILMS AUTHORED BY VADIM ZAKHAROV 1989–2007
Camera / Director: Vadim Zakharov
Strangely, even after having shot many kilometers of video tape, I don’t feel like a video artist. In many ways, this has to do with my approach to material as such. Archival work always demands documentary veracity. But for creativity and authorship you need professional equipment and a great deal of thought on what to film and how to film it. I don’t have any of these things. Even if I have enough strength and enough of an attention span for the former, the latter somehow seems like a waste of money and time. Maybe this is why I am not very sure of myself. Still, over the last years, I’ve made what amounts to quite a few films. Some of them emerged from larger projects and are linked to them conceptually, through cause and effect. Others came about by coincidence: suddenly, some material I had collected at some point made a connection in my head with some other subject; all that remained to be done was to present them properly and to add something or another. But still, this is all pretty dilettantish in terms of approach, even if it has its own strengths, which I value greatly. For example, the absence of ambition and any intense decision-making dynamic. But one minus is that my films need a context. Very few of them – such as Dialogues, Bauhaus Mood in Tel Aviv, or the Apocrypha series – are self-sufficient. But it’s important for me to respect this boundary and not to become a cinematographic professional. Film today has taken up too much of contemporary art’s territory, including its dilettantish zones, by the way. We need to get beyond the cinematographic wave of the last decade in order to reach a place where there is no desire to entertain and frighten all of those perverted spectators. My direction is to let all the others go ahead. V. Zakharov, 2005
Video material on Zakharov’s flight in a two-seat airplane above the participants of the action “The Flight of Zechariah”. Castle Eybesfeld. This action took place on October 3rd 1992 in the framework of the festival Styrian Autumn.
DVD, 11 min. 1992–2000
Video film made by Zakharov from a horse, sitting back to front. Music by Sergei Prokofiev from the ballet Romeo and Juliet. The film was used in the installation Don Quixote against the Internet.
DVD, 5 min. 2000
Video film made by Zakharov from a horse, sitting back to front. Music by Sergei Prokofiev from the ballet Romeo and Juliet. The film was used in the installation Don Quixote against the Internet.
DVD, 5 min. 2000
Video materials about cults and modern prophets are
put together in the film The Lake of Oblivion. The videotape is accopanied by a CD on which the soundtrack has been
translated into dead languages – Latin, ancient Greek, Gothic.
DVD, 30 min. 2001
Ayutthaya (Thailand)
Soundtrack from the movie “Being John Malkovich”.
DVD, 4 min. 2002
Zakharov on the following occasions:
• Ilya Kabakov und Pavel Pepperstein – at a news conference during Ilya Kabakov‘s exhibition We Are Living Here at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 1995
• Andrei Monastyrsky – at the exhibition Monastyrsky / Pepperstein at the
Galerie Paszti-Bott, Cologne, 1995
• Vladimir Sorokin – during a reading at the Stadtbibliothek, Cologne, 2000
• Yuri Leiderman – at Vadim Zakharov‘s residence, Cologne, 2002
• Ivan Sokolov playing Chopin on the mute piano
DVD, 18 min. 2002
This video material was discovered by tossing a video camera up into the air inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
Music: Gary Moore (slowed down to 10% of its original speed).
DVD, 11 min. 2002
This video material was discovered by tossing a video camera up into the air inside the Garden of Gethsemane.
Music: Billy Holiday (slowed down to 18% and at original speed).
DVD, 6 min. 2002
This video material was discovered by tossing a video camera up into the air inside the fortress of Masada.
Music: Pierre Pinchik Roso D’Shabbos, 1928.
DVD, 6 min. 2002
This video material was shot at Mitzpe Ramon and Masada, March, 2002, Israel.
The film’s soundtrack consists of recorded table talk.
DVD, 6 min. 2002
The idea of the film Bauhaus Mood in Tel-Aviv is to juxtapose and combine two different periods of time: the tragic 1920s-40s, when emmigrant architects who had fled Nazi-occupied Europe constructed an unprecedented number of Bauhaus-style buildings in Tel-Aviv and life in Tel-Aviv today. This juxtaposition is shown as if through a prism (through the old style filter). Music: Dmitri Shostakovich.
DVD, 9 min. 2004
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- OLEG ARONSON AND CHRISTINA MIHALCHUK
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- EKATERINA DEGOT AND ALEXANDER KUTEPOV
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- JOSEPH BACKSTEIN AND ANTONINA KLIMENKO
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- VIKTOR MISIANO AND NADEZDA UNTILOVA
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- ELENA PETROVSKAJA AND ALEXEJ CHIKRIN
The project “Lessons in the Boudoir” was prepared for the Stella Art Gallery in February 2006. This project consists of a series of real lectures, held by leading critics, art historians,
and philosophers in an absolutely intimate setting of a boudoir, in the presence of a top model, without any other spectators.
Video film about installation “Black birds” of
Vadim Zakharov. this is installation was made for First Thessaloniki Biennale and took place in Museum of Byzantine culture, 2007
Music: Ivan Sokolov
DVD 12 min. 2007