Untitled, Ostrava 2021
video, CGI, 10:00
The august issue of Sreda online magazine features a video work by Vita Shakhnovich, a graduate of the A. Rodchenko Moscow School of Photography and Multimedia.
The video narrative, devoid of the usual cinematographic action, is reduced to a lingering anticipation of a protagonist. The inner compositional space of the work is ad maximum depersonalised: there are no attributes of the objective world or artifacts testifying to the geographical location or anyone’s presence. The video puts the viewer into a meditative state, lulling any hope of plot developments. This anticipation dissolves time itself, and the non-human CGI gaze gets locked in an intense and permanent self-deception, mistakingly trying to grip even the slightest changes. The digital shell thus helps to depict the creation of an empty situation, where only the atmosphere and not the action is present, and the viewer is made to invent and interpret the non-existent plot.