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The fourth e-flux Prize in Oberhausen was awarded at the 64th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen to Russian video artist Dimitri Venkov for his work Gimny Moskovii (The Hymns of Moscovy). “The aesthetic framing of this film flips both history and space to render a vision of a metropolis that is not only visually and sonically spectacular, but truly intergalactic,” stated the jury. In this video work, the artist portrays history though architecture and music, matching the styles of Moscow’s 20th and 21st century buildings with electronic variations of the Soviet and Russian national anthem. The juxtaposition captures an aesthetic evolution driven by the evolution of ideology.
Dimitri Venkov (*1980, Novosibirsk, Russia) is a video artist who makes highly structured feature films that respond to social and political events in Russia and abroad. His works have reached out to artistic, film, and academic institutional contexts. He is a graduate of the Rodchenko Moscow School of Photography and Multimedia, and holds an MA in Film Studies from the University of Oregon, Eugene. In 2012 he received the Young Artist Kandinsky Prize for his film Mad Mimes (2012), and in 2012 and 2014 he was nominated for the Moscow Innovation Prize. Among his films are Krisis (2016), Like the Sun (2013), Mad Mimes (2012), America (2012), The Chinese Room of Alan Turing (2011) and In a Different Time (2010). Group exhibitions include: Iteration: Contemporary Artists Respond to MMOMA Collection, Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Moscow (2016); Cannibal Manifesto: Mimesis as Resistance, Karst Foundation, Plymouth (2015); Burning News: Recent Art from Russia, Hayward Gallery, London (2014); Close and Far, Calvert 22, London (2014); 5th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, Moscow (2013); and Bergen Assembly, Bergen (2013). He is represented by the Triumph Gallery in Moscow.
The e-flux Prize in Oberhausen is awarded annually to “an exceptional film and video work which reshapes the poetic and electric potential of moving images in the age of planetary circulation of information.” The 2018 jury members were Katie Davies (artist and filmmaker, Great Britain), Kristy Matheson (senior film programmer at The Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Australia), Peter Milat (director of the Human Rights Film Festival, Croatia), Timo Soppela (director of the Artists’ Association MUU and MUU Galleria, Finland) and Daniel Queiroz (curator and programmer, Brazil).
