Last March

How does the collective social memory of World War II influence our present and future?

Curated by Antonio Geusa and Anna Evtiugina

The Last March immersive video installation combines the tragedy of the war and "missing in action" soldiers with the joy of the victory, coupling them with artists' interpretation of this collective history's influence on our lives today. The project is a collaboration of artists of two different generations: Naum Medovoy (1937), who survived WWII, and Nikita Shokhov (1988) and Oleg Makarov (1984), who are two generations younger. Medovoy immigrated from the USSR to the US over 40 years ago, where he became known as a documentary filmmaker and artist. For many years, he dedicated himself to revising the conventional representation of the Second World War in art. The upcoming exhibition continues his renowned Last March cycle, including a documentary film and a series of works on paper. Creating a large-scale video installation was our deliberate choice because video is a medium whose language strongly appeals to young viewers.

A picture without a story is never art. The difference between contemporary art and other forms of artistic creativity is in its presenting works that always keep a trace, either material or conceptual, of the artist who made them. Ignoring the personal, the creator, and where his/her unique vision of the world comes from reduces the work to a mere soulless object, a decoration of the every day, which does not transcend the boundaries of the functional. It is also true that the complexity of a work of art cannot be expressed in one single story only. However, biography is usually one of them, an essential starting point – never the finish line, of course.

Naum Medovoy was born in the Soviet Union. He came of age in the troubled years when people were busy rebuilding their lives in the ashes of a devastating war that had reshaped the consciousness of the whole of humankind. To young Naum, the Cinema became his vision of the world in those years. In particular, he started to investigate the recorded image as a historical document and mastered its visual and narrative power on viewers. However, as an artist and a man of ideals, he could not conform to the dictates of the State, which permitted Socialist Realism to be the only possible canon in art. All forms of artistic expression that were not socialist in content and realist in form were banned, and transgressors were persecuted and often punished with imprisonment. It was the moral duty of each writer, artist, musician, and director to offer the Soviet citizens books, paintings, music, and films that would speak of the happiness of building the greatest and most democratic country on the planet.

Shows

2017 - “The Last March“, 6-channel video, 4-channel sound, Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Russia

2018 - “Moscow - New York", 1-channel video, stereo sound, EEP Berlin, Germany

2021 - “The Last March“, 10-channel video, 5-channel sound, Cube Moscow, Russia

2021 - “The Last March“, multichannel projection in the atrium, multichannel architectural video facade, multichannel sound, Yeltsin Center, Yekaterinburg, Russia