SeaSicknesses
Filmed during one-month fake expedition in the Pacific Ocean with Russian scientists who pretended to research the consequences of the Fukushima’s cataclysm after a year and a half after the accident. I call it fake because from its very begining it was clear from the captain explanations that the area was clean: the directions of the winds and currents had been explored and were well known. An artist started collecting the images of the moving ocean. The rhythm and sound of the ocean masses came into conflict with everyday people’s thoughts, talks and actions. The travellers’ talks were collected as well. The largeness and greatness of the ocean with its cosmic rhythm of eternity was opposed to small human beings on the ship and by the sea. The voices of sailors, scientists and poachers are reasoning, discussing, talking with each other about some simple things and sometimes questionable dealings while the ocean lives its own life.
Hole in the City
The video looks like an imitation of a computer game where the author is investigating Berlin’s weirdness which is concentrated in the abandoned spaces in the city - “holes in the city”. So she is “flying” - as a computer game hero - over the city, but not alone. She appears in the video with her friend. Moreover these two friends are duplicated three times to create a bigger and stronger team. The duplication as a sort of self-support: the heroes are afraid to be swallowed up by the numerous holes in the city before they finish their research. I thought a lot about them for a while and filmed them trying to understand their meaning - when Russian invasion into Ukraine started. Russia is my native country and the fact that my country is an aggressor now is very painful for me. I recognized that “lost” spaces in Berlin in some way owe their origin to my native country; I mean the traces of East and West Berlin everywhere. The yellow-blue flag appears from time to time in a fabricated Berlin landscape to support the Ukrainian civil society in its struggle for freedom and justice.
Crossover
Filmed on a long travolator interchange at Châtelet metro station in Paris. It resulted in a sort of a "foot made loop" combined with several excerpts from a philosophical poem, based on a travel to the African jungle, written by Berlin based poet and artist Ilia Kitup. The lyrics, presented as running text, describe the poet's thoughts and visions during his adventurous trip to the jungle. The visual and sound parts of the video deal with another trip, which takes place in the core of a big city, under a concrete jungle. One could easily state certain formal contradictions between the images in motion and the text, but, paradoxically, they work together as a joint cluster.
Year of production: 2014
Color / Sound
Running Time: 8:39 min
A story of Margarita Novikova mum's vacation in Lithuania in August 1968 when Soviet troops invaded Czechoslovakia, told during Russian "Hybrid warfare" in Ukraine in 2014. Based on a personal ritual performance, a family chronicles filmmed in '60s and Maria Arendt's embroidery made after these chronicles.
Year of production: 2014
CHRONICLES ON THE LAP, part 2 / ХРОНИКИ НА КОЛЕНКАХ, ч. 2
Running time: 1:38 min
AddColor / Sound
Animated shadows cut from Maria Arendt's embroidery "watching" Margarita Novikova family's chronicles filmed by Vladimir Alexeev, the grand uncle, in '60s and '70s.
Year of production: 2014
CHRONICLES ON THE LAP, part 3 / ХРОНИКИ НА КОЛЕНКАХ, ч. 3
Running time: 1:57 min
Color / No sound
Animated Maria Arendt's embroidery combined with Margarita Novikova family's chronicles filmed by Vladimir Alexeev, the grand uncle, in '60s and '70s.
Year of production: 2014
IN OUR TOWN
Running time: 2:58 min
Color / No sound
Animated comics by Ilia Kitup. Video mapping on 17.5.14 at Starosadsky, 5, Moscow, - Museum Night 2014.
Year of production: 2014
В НАШЕМ ГОРОДКЕ
Running time: 2:58 min
Color / No sound / Russian version
Animated comics by Ilia Kitup. Video mapping on 17.5.14 at Starosadsky, 5, Moscow, - Museum Night 2014.
Year of production: 2013-2016
..deriving a nightmare's formula
Running Time: 03:00 min / Color / Sound
Year of production: 2014
Running Time: 2:22 min
Color / Sound
An attempt to reconstruct tactile sensations from a very old but well remembered dream. More than ten years passed since that night; it was not a nightmare, but a dream - most probably - about love. Some invisible “supreme forces” were at work in this dream and brought me into an altered state of consciousness. Perhaps to explain what love is. I felt like a dubious biological construction kit consisted of body fragments wallowing in a sort of “prebiotic soup”. Each of the floating fragments was touch-sensitive in its own way and they all behaved strangely when contacted each other. I don't remember if that all helped me understand anything about love then. Maybe this video reconstruction will help.
Year of production: 2010
Running Time: 5:56 min
Color / Sound
The video is an attempt to look into the issue of processes regulation as such. In other words the author is trying to research what stands behind processes regulation when a lot of people are involved in it - by using three different models of processes regulation in city environment. A viewer sees crowds moving and regulated in Seoul, Bordeaux and Milan.
Year of production: 2013
Running Time: 3:24 min
Color / Sound
The main hero of the video works by hand in his own small jeweller workshop somewhere in the post-post-industrial Russian megapolis. The jeweller processes metals, stones, pieces of glass and so on and it looks like the workshop is the only spot in the area which could be called a factory, even it is small and the machines used by the jeweller are handicraft. An attempt to “set in concrete” the beauty of hand-labour with the help of video methods and pretending it is a test of an imaginary relief’s generator.
Year of production: 2011
Animated documentary about Soviet coup d'état in August 1991. Authors: Margarita Novikova, Elena Michajlowska. 2011
Running Time: 5:00 min / Color / Sound / English Subtitles
Animated documentary about Soviet coup d'état in August 1991: 10 personal memories (2 businessmen, a writer, an actor, an engineer, a politician, 2 contemporary artists, a political expert and a culture expert ) about three extremely important for Russian history days.
Year of production: 2011
Cinderella 2.0
Running Time: 1:43 min
Color / Sound
The video is a sort of experimental self-portrait. The author had an intention to solve one of her personal problems and understand, what is love and what do people do to find a real one. For this purpose the author made a sort of experimental personal performance: what happened in case if Cinderella's story was "inverted"? And it was she who looked for the Prince. And not with a help of the shoe but only a sock - a thing that suit the size to many Princes!
Year of production: 2011
Running Time: 2:39 min
Color / Sound
The video is a sort of experimental self-portrait. The author had an intention to solve one of her personal psychological and may be a philosophical problems. She was afraid of huge apple harvests at her grandmamma summer house in childhood and many years after - and did not understand why. After making a sort of experimental personal performance and video about it the author realized that she did not believe in parents' and grandparents' happiness about the harvest. They felt happy and protected not because of what they were (came as they were) and their love to each other but because of lot of food. It is understandable, but life is about love, not food only.