Prepping for the film Beyond Desire

 

Behind The Scenes - Beyond Desire - Dance Film

 

Beyond Desire is an experimental short about female desire, shame and betrayal.  Drawing from a highly personal experience we follow a vulnerable young woman experiencing a breakdown via a collision of conflicting relationships and gender power struggles.

A State of Uncertainty: The Pioneer

For ‘A State of Uncertainty’ Soviet-Era photographs echoing childhood images of my relatives from the 60s were recreated.

The Pioneer 

The school uniform was recreated using a hodge-podge of contemporary garments, referencing old Soviet photographs of my auntie,  whilst the Lenin badge, Pioneers cap and Cheburashka are genuine 60s antique Soviet articles which I brought over from my grandmothers house over a decade ago. 

A State of Uncertainty Installation

A State of Uncertainty 

The exhibition is dedicated to my mother, who was brought up in the Soviet Union amidst circumstances of turmoil and trauma both domestically within her household and on a grand political scale. Her experience is an intense narrative of growing up in 1970s Soviet Russia amidst a rigid set of social conditioning, whilst being raised within a violently patriarchal household before fleeing an uncertain and chaotic Russia of the 90s. 

Within this first iteration of the series, I could only start at paying homage to the stories I’d heard from her, and the photographs I’d seen and remember seeing as a child. Each recreated photograph is a story of a moment in history, of her experience, and her mother’s (my grandmother’s) experience, and each has a backstory that holds both my own nostalgia, and the ghost of a lived history. Our generational Russian memories are interwoven; mushroom picking in the forest as a form of therapy, sad birthday parties that always ended in tears, school portraits with Lenin badges as implicit propaganda hung proudly on faded wallpaper, debutante portraits against the new family curtains, gherkins in the kitchen, the new birthday toy - a hula hoop! 

Then into the future; the rebellious teenage years and seductive poses pulled from 80s magazines, folk costumes to preserve heritage, a suitcase packed for an approaching escape. Underneath it all is the confusion, the depression, the weight of family life, the repetition of cooked meals and the dull ritual of peeling potatoes, the violent father, the oppression of society, the iron curtain, the fantasy for freedom and escape from the mundane. The sentimentality that comes with nostalgia and the pained feelings of familiarity; are the soft light of the lamps, the rosy wallpaper, the warm reds, the smiling ghosts.

Installation | Asylum Studios | October 2021