Mysteries

Join us on e-flux Video & Film for an online screening of Sid Iandovka’s Mysteries (2021), streaming from Sunday, August 1 through Tuesday, August 31, 2021. The film is presented alongside Sid Iandovka and Anya Tsyrlina’s Horizōn (2019) and Anya Tsyrlina’s All Other Things Equal (2020), as part of the monthly series Staff picks.

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.

For more information, contact program@e-flux.com.