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Margarita Novikova
Margarita Novikova An artist's statement The main topic of my work as a video artist is conflicts and contradictions and the thin verges where the conflicts originate. These are the conflicts between justice and injustice, usefulness and uselessness, male and female, eternity and vanity, sincerity and hypocrisy, clarity and formalism, stupidity and intelligence, etc.
I refer to conflicts and contradictions as philosophical categories; so I see myself as a video-Aristotle, who tries to investigate philosophical questions with the help of the language of moving images. However, I am unable to prove my statement with argument; it is mainly based on my feelings and perception. So let’s call it a sort of a joke. I can call my artistic method of subject development “psychofilming�. It is based on collaging of chronotopes, that is a combina-
A still from Sloth (2012)
Still from the HOLE IN THE CITY video
tion of several different time and space units in one video frame. That’s why I sometimes apply multiscreen in my videos. I also use video collaging and sound design, based on my collection of selfrecorded sounds and noises. The combination of multiscreen, video collaging and sound design is one of the methods of recombination of different documentary or/ and imaginary events and objects. I usually film them with my video camera at the exact
moment when I feel I have to do it, or at some point, when I organize some staged/ performance filming. Video is the basic media I work with, but sometimes I use mixed media and ready-made objects for creating installations and participation/ relational projects.
An interview with
Margarita Novikova Since the first time we have watched your work Hole in the City we have been really impressed by your personal concept of psychogeography. Could you tell us a particular episode that has helped the birth of this project? Ok, a particular episode. I was in London after a few sessions of filming the abandoned places of Berlin. I had a collection of footage and planned to think about its conceptualization. It was definitely February, 20th, when I learned about the Maidan massacre in Kiev. Many of the newsreels proved that some of the killers of the Kiev’s rally participants could be connected with the Russian Secret Service or even were Russian themselves. What the fuck! What are they doing? I even could not imagine what would happen in a couple of months, but either way I was very unnerved. Later on, walking in the city I saw a small group of people with Ukrainian flags in front of the Houses of Parliament. It was a Ukrainian expatriates’ rally supporting their native country against the killings in Kiev. Some of them were crying and so did I. Then I left them for a meeting with my friend, a London based artist. First of all I asked her: “How would you represent a hole on your drawing, if you need to?” I asked her because at that moment the concept of the film relating to the “holes” in Berlin had already dawned on me. Was it about psychogeography? Russia has a huge importance in your artistic research. Let’s speak about influences. Have any Russian artist from the older generation inspired you? These are certainly Yury Zlotnikov with his ideas - among other matters - of plastics in cinema; Andrey Monastyrsky with his metaphysical poetics; Yury Albert with his clarity of ideas; an artist Alexander Sokolov as a sophisticated art theorist. I would also gladly mention some younger artists, such as Anatoly Osmolovsky for his bravura in one of his early performances in the Red Square. Painter Ilya
Margarita Novikova
Orlov for his helicopter video buzz over a cardboard map. A street artist Pavel 183 for his honesty and courage. Liza Morozova for her hyper-honest, serious and personally brave performance statements. Ilia Kitup for his drawing industry and productivity. And, above all, Maria Arendt for the overall finesse of her artistic work and not less her human and personal delicacy. We have been impressed by the way you are able to "see" the traces of the past in Berlin, revealing a visual approach destabilizing the dimension of time and space. How did you develop your style? In the late ‘80s I started to use a 16-mm camera for my experiments with filming of fragments of an old village in the middle of a new rising Moscow suburb. I got the camera from the student documentary studio in MEPhI where I studied. Neither myself nor my friends from the studio had ever heard about video art at that time. So my experiments looked strange for all of us. I’d love to have a look at what I filmed then, but - it's a pity - all my early films were lost. I can only suppose that it could be an attempt of video art style thinking and self-
Still from the HOLE IN THE CITY video
expressing. In the mid ‘90s I as a film editor and a crew chief working on an absurdist TV comedy series (ha-ha, I don’t even remember its name!). The series was based on early paradoxical humour stories by Alexander Selin. The whole creative process was all about destabilizing all the possible dimensions! The destabilization process had successfully begun. After a break (working as a journalist, photographer and magazine editor) I finally returned to moving images again. This time it was video. I will show the development of my style/ methods through the description of some of my works below. Once I decided to employ a specific film editing method - multiscreen - instead of making a 3channel video installation. I am talking about the PROCESSES’ REGULATION video where I combined three different pieces of footage in one frame for the first time. I divided the frame into the main screen and two smaller screens. Every footage “jumps” to the bigger screen when the episode of regulation comes to its culmination. The footage was filmed within one year in three different public spaces in Seoul, Bordeaux and Milan. They were connected together in an attempt to look into the issue of
processes’ regulation as such and to research what stands behind regulation when a lot of people are involved in it. I was not planning to use the multiscreen method as my signature method, but the subject matter imposed itself in such a way that at times I simply had to employ this technic my work from time to time. For example it to be utilized in my recombination of events (documentary and staged) in two “self-portraits” (HARVEST. SUBLIMATIONS and CINDERELLA 2.0). As I can state now the multiscreen method helps to "collage chronotopes" (that is a combination of several different time and space units in one video frame). My other project, an interactive online web museum ПутчЁSelf (PutchYourself) could be considered only by a stretch a sample of multiscreen project. It recounts the story of the Soviet Coup d’Etat in August 1991 through personal accounts of these events. It consists of: 1) automatically loaded interview snippets arranged to tell the story of the Coup with options to pause and restart; 2) character facemap, allowing the viewer to navigate through different stories by clicking on faces of project participants; 3) archival material,
Screenshot of PUTHYOURSELF interactive project
thematically placed to illustrated stories and can be expanded for closer inspection; 4) full interviews, stored externally on Youtube.com. In the video IN OUR TOWN produced for street projection on a building on the Museums Night one can see animated amusing comics by Ilia Kitup combined with my footage. Experimental film SEASICKNESSES contrasting perspective and sound. Filmed day after day the Pacific Ocean’s majestic movement embodied by the sailor’s voices telling their earth-bound stories. So my methods look different but I think they are rather simple; the style depends on my
purpose. I just try to keep it comprehensible, even though we are talking not about a film but about a participatory aesthetic project COMMUNICATION LINE - SINGLE SOCKS CLUB where the viewers acted as their own medium. Putting a sock on the rope the viewer took part in the creation of the installation. One wrote their messages on a piece of paper, chose a sock to place wishes in, hung the sock on any part of the rope that was attractive to him aesthetically. A recurrent characteristic of your artworks is experience as starting point of artistic
utilization of experience of others, artists and theorists as well. Some of my works are based on my private experience such as the CHRONICLES ON THE LAP where I participated in the event described. On the other hand in the VENUSIAN SKETCHES only imagination worked because I myself have never travelled to Venus. 5) We have been impressed with your video work which CHRONICLES ON THE LAP. Could you introduce our readers to this project? Originally CHRONICLES ON THE LAP was a part of a collaborative exhibition project “Inside Out” of two artists, Maria Arendt, a contemporary embroiderer, and myself. She made a set of embroideries inspired by the soviet films of the ‘60s. Exactly at that time I inherited some family chronicles filmed by my grand-uncle. I proposed to Maria to combine our forces in the research of the reciprocity between pop culture (old fiction films about soviet families’ life in ‘60s, inspired her) and real private life (for example fixed as filmed chronicles) and also contemporary art and today’s life. While we were working on the project the Russian invasion of Ukraine started and incidentally one of the videos from my grand-uncle’s archive was about a similar event in 1968 when Russia also invaded another country. I’d just finished two short animations of embroideries’ digital images combined with a chronicle of episodes of weddings in the ‘60s and ‘70s according to our project theme. But these videos felt so light-hearted and inappropriate for the moment! I realized that I cannot avoid the subject of Ukraine anymore.ì
production: in your opinion, is experience an absolutely necessary part of creative process? No, absolutely not. I believe smartness, an open mind and fast reactions are much more important for artistic production. But regardless of whether we wish it or not everyone has their own private experience and perceives the world in their own way, regardless of whether we wish it or not. If experience provides an opportunity to see things and their interconnections wider and deeper, I will definitely answer 'yes' to this question. Even if we are talking about the
SINGLE SOCKS CLUB public project
Margarita Novikova
Still from the CHRONICLES ON THE LAP video
Still from the CINDERELLA 2.0 video
Still from the PROCESSES' REGULATION video
I was born in the 1960s and as a small girl I was a citizen of an aggressive country, the USSR. Now I find myself in the similar position yet again in my country, Russia is an aggressor again. So as an artist I cannot help but reflect this in my work. Painful events affect everyone in Russia, even though many people don’t want to notice them and never feel their own responsibility. I recollect 1968 when I was a young girl and spent my summer holiday on the Baltic Sea with my mother. I do remember the days when the adults looked exited and scared: Soviet tanks entered Prague. I asked my mother to recount her memories of those days
and recorded them for the third and most important video for the “Inside Out” project. For example I knew from my mom’s story that I asked her in 1968 to send me to an orphanage while she would go to the war. CHRONICLES ON THE LAP is about normal everyday people’s life and their willingness to be happy even when something terrible happens. It’s about the delicate verge between indifference and personal involvement; about pain and responsibility for what’s going on even if you are not particularly on the fighting line. Trying to express these painful feelings I decided that I have to make a personal ritualistic
thoughts. Just like my mom did on her summer vacation in 1968. Could you take us through your creative process when starting a new project? You want to learn my secrets! Ok, there is usually some coincidence that leads to an idea of a video. It could something triggered by something which I have filmed but suddenly takes on a new significance for me. It could happen the other way round. Changes to the concept and the layout can happen at any moment. And my inner editor with the big sharp scissors - thanks to my previous job as a magazine editor - wakes up from time to time. In time, I hope. Thanks for sharing your time and thoughts with us, Margarita. What's next for Margarita Novikova? Thank you for your interest and for the deep and thoughtful questions. It was very useful for me to frame and define the principles of my work. I am planning to continue the development of the relational/ participatory theme. And I finally will finish my long-delayed project which I started 4 years ago in India. I was invited to an Indian burial by a gentleman from London who brought to Varanasi ashes from UK to bury them there. We became friends with this gentleman; we met many times in London and India again. I recorded his explanations as to why is he bringing ashes to India,
performance. I was sitting in an empty kitchen in Berlin with several jars of gouache in front of me, and an open book with Soviet photos of the ‘60s. Looking at the photos devoted to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and thinking about Ukraine today I painted my laps yellow and blue. Then I wiped out the colours of the Ukrainian flag (yellow and blue) with bloody coloured paint. I had to do something with my feelings and I did it with the help of my body and yellow, blue and red gouache. I fixed the performance using my Galaxy Tab 2, closed the book, washed the floor and myself. Then I left for some nice party somewhere in Kreuzberg - to clear my mind of the difficult
what does it mean for him, what does he and the others feel about loneliness, if the rituals help and so on. I projected a model of a door rotating around a vertical axis for this projec. The door is a screen for three (I suppose) videos projected from three different directions onto the door. At the same time the door should symbolize the convergence and divergence of perceptions of varying types through time and space. Of my other projects I would like to mention the Propeller Mobile Conference (PMC), founded in 2013 with Berlin based artist Ilia Kitup. The program of PMC includes screenings, performances, exhibitions of graphics and books, lectures on art and literary readings, all in three languages English, German and Russian. The concept of PMC is simple enough: both participants are mobile; they travel together with a notebook and a folder, which contain all the necessary material in digital and paper form. We are ready to be your guests on request!