On September 20, 2016 CYLAND MediaArtLab hosted retrospective screening of films by Sid Iandovka (Basel) at the White Hall of the TAIGA Space followed by Q&A with the artist.
Sid Iandovka has been a founding member of the legendary Siberian experimental music and video collective “schwimmen” (1991-1994): some of the never-before-seen pre-digital works from that time have been included in the program.
Sid Iandovka’s works have always been structurally experimental and never conceptual. Appropriating the language of dreams, his wordless uncanny films deal with the fragmented and the random, with traumа of memory and loss. The artist works with his own archive of video footage interspersing it with a diverse range of found material and imagery of his own construction.
His recent videos are stitched together from visual fragments undergoing varying levels of manipulation and continual reconstitution; only here, fragmentary does not precede the whole, but exists beyond and after it. There complex relations are punctuated by sound always composed by the artist himself. Marked by a highly developed and peculiar montage style, disquieting and entrancing, these short films create an emotionally charged metaphoric fabrication of reality – although the only metaphor here is optical.
In 2015 CYLAND MediaArtLab team has introduced a course of lectures and workshops on art and technology at the TAIGA Space in St. Petersburg. Since then their popularity gave us confidence in providing an educational platform to share thoughts and gain experience from artists, critics, curators, coders, engineers and media activists. You can learn more about these activities at the dedicated page.