Two videos by Russian artist Anna Ceeh with music by Parkmodern aka Evgeny Beresnev (Vladivostok, RUS)
"I recorded the material for these three videos on the Kola Peninsula near Murmansk and in the town of Kolomya in Ukraine" explains St. Petersburg artist Anna Ceeh. "I subjected my camera 'confrontationally' to everyday media reality in order to create a new reality.' In the Kontakt Gallery one sees only excerpts from the three videos, in fact these works are considerably longer. They mix the realities of the media (TV), captured on video, with mediatised reality. It is often impossible to tell one from the other. On the videos we see TV recordings from the Second World War, a television programme from Beslan ('One Year Later') and recordings from Murmansk. "The deliberate alienation by means colour and music aims at giving this new reality, which is perhaps more real than actual reality, a 'helping hand', as it were", says artist Anna Ceeh. In her pieces she refers to the work of Russian philologist Michail Bachtin who examined the 'power of the carnivalesque' in literature. Translated into a visual and audio visual language: the grotesque allows us to liberate time and space from preordained pseudo-norms, to examine the contents of existing, manipulated hierarchies and to topple them in order to create room for the new. Anna Ceeh was born in 1974 in St. Petersburg and is studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. She works as a video artist and photographer, festival organiser and music label manager (Laton records). She lives and works in Vienna. Places she presents her work include "Galerie Hit" (solo exhibition) and "A4", both in Bratislava (SK), Secession, Vienna (A), MAK - Depot of Contemporary Art, Vienna (A); Künstlerhaus,Vienna; Kunstraum, Innsbruck (A); "Noize and Fury" festival, Moscow (RU); Volkspalast, Berlin (D), Center for contemporary art, St. Petersburg (RU); "Detali zvuku", Kiev (UK);
