Sid Iandovka & Anya Tsyrlina, Horizōn (2019), All Other Things Equal (2020), and Mysteries (2021)
e-flux Video & Film is very pleased to present this month’s staff pick, featuring three shorts by Sid Iandovka and Anya Tsyrlina: Horizōn (2019), All Other Things Equal (2020), and Mysteries (2021), streaming from Sunday, August 1 through Tuesday, August 31, 2021.
Iandovka and Tysrlina are among the very few artists who recognize, understand, and—perhaps most importantly—permit the strange and tacit artifactualities of medial procedures and artifacts to come to the foreground, to “open up,” and become salient and sensible, to withdraw from conventional spatialities and let a work take place, “on its own terms,” unsteady and strange, untethered to familiar, predictable orders of mediated perception and consumption. No matter that you are fascinated and transfixed (these works are immediately pleasurable and transporting) and none of the usual presumptions and expectations are met. It takes deep courage and inspiration to so carefully and intricately configure sound and image, and then leave it alone. (Thomas Zummer)
Watch the films here.
Sid Iandovka and Anya Tsyrlina, Horizōn, 2019
7 minutes
“The moment we think of the world as disenchanted…we set limits to the ways the past can be narrated.”
—Dipesh Chakrabarty
An unremarkable random ’70s newsreel from the artists’ hometown in Soviet Siberia forms the substrate for a relentless exploration of the representational and narratological techniques. Without ever collapsing into a “story” or abstraction, Horizōn recants the relationship between analog and digital, surface and reference, sense and experience, past and present. (Thomas Zummer)
Anya Tsyrlina, All Other Things Equal, 2020
19 minutes
Crafting fairytale fiction from documentary-style late-Soviet propaganda, All Other Things Equal is a hypnotic and sensual work of detournement with construction atypical of compilation films. Resisting essayistic meaning, the film instead presents a series of stacked moments that are elliptical, sensory, and quietly subversive in picturing a world populated wholly by women. The polar opposite of didactic, All Other Things Equal instead embraces the extra-symbolic and extra-textual elements of these images and the spectral montage of their arrangement, constructing a world which does not map easily onto the contemporary notions and stakes of Western feminism. (Herb Shellenberger)
Sid Iandovka, Mysteries, 2021
7 minutes
Stitched together from diaristic video fragments from the early 2000s, and vintage digital artifacts undergoing varying levels of manipulation and continual reconstitution, Mysteries is a wordless emotive film that deals with the fragmented and the random, with memory and loss, that can equally captivate and frustrate. Private memories and personal story are fictionalized by working with musical and sound genre codes and ghostly allusions to popular and “high” culture, such as Romanticism, with its inherent fragmentation, self-reflective irony, and narratological detachment—all references erased to the point of purely intuitive appeal. But despite the active use of kitsch elements, the ambivalence of images leaves room for mysteries—and thus opens up an additional affective level beyond the opposition of sincerity and artificiality.
About the artists
Sid Iandovka and Anya Tsyrlina (both born in Novosibirsk, USSR) are an artist duo whose practice extends across many different media, predominantly moving images. Though only selected works of theirs are co-authored in a traditional sense, as both have distinct interests and aesthetics, they have collaborated (on and off) for over 20 years—ultimately creating a joint, entirely independent, “homemade” production approach for their films. Their working methods are not products of any educational/professional institutions and their practice is not rooted in any state; it is immaterial and doesn’t benefit from any national/international funding, resources or structures. The artists prefer for their own histories and words to remain in the background—but it’s not essential to know the whys and hows of these works, since there’s an almost alchemical and mystical quality to them that supersedes their construction. (Herb Shellenberger)
About the series
e-flux Video & Film: staff picks is a monthly streaming series of staff picks and recommended videos designed to disrupt the monotony of an algorithm. Before the end times of big data, we used to discover suggested content along dusty shelves in video rental stores, where Post-it notes scribbled by shift workers implored us to experience the same movies that made them guffaw, scream, or weep. Sometimes the content bored us, sometimes it overwhelmed us, and sometimes, as if by magic, it was just right. e-flux invites you to relive this rental store mode of perusal, with personalized picks curated through judgment that does not take into consideration your viewing history.
For more information, contact program [at] e-flux.com.
