CYLAND Video Archive is pleased to announce that two early short films by Evgeny Yufit «Spring» (1987) and «The Woodcutter» (1985) have been added to the collection.
http://videoarchive.archive.cyland.org/video_artists/yufit-evgeny/
Evgeny Yufit is a cult figure in the underground art movement of Leningrad/St. Petersburg. He’s considered to be the key filmmaker of the Parallel Cinema School, is the founder of the independent film studio Mzhalalafilm, is one of the first Russian independent directors, and is highly regarded in the classics of world cinema. He is the director of five 35-mm feature films, including Knights of Heaven (1989), Papa, Father Frost Is Dead (1991), Silver Heads (1997), Killed by Lightning (2002), and Bipedalism (2005).
Evgeny Yufit pioneered necrorealism, a radical artistic movement in Russian art, which turned into the theme of death through the prism of black humor, pivoting on aesthetics of punk and social grotesque.
«In Yufit’s films and photographs the living dead move across the frame. No, they haven’t risen from the grave because of an unspecified man-made disaster, as in the films of Yufit’s big fan George Romero. Yufit’s characters are neither living nor dead. They are excluded from the social order, forced to roam the outskirts of big cities. They cannot die because they cannot live. They wander on the remains of universal ideology, a new order that enslaves man no less than the totalitarian regimes had.
Yufit is one of the most radical artists. His radicalism lies in his steadfast artistic and social stance. Death and human psychopathology are the unshakeable foundations of his ontological-aesthetic program.»
— Olesya Turkina, Viktor Mazin
Evgeny Yufit’s personal exhibition is currently on view at Marina Gisich Gallery. The project is curated by Olesya Turkina, a friend and researcher of the artist’s work, who curated a large-scale retrospective of necrorealism at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art (MMoMA) in 2011.
Watch an online tour on Marina Gisich Gallery Instagram.
————————
The films were published with the permission of the artist’s family.
CYLAND MediaArtLab would like to thank Timofei Yufit and Masha Godovannaya