“PSYCHOSIS”
inspired by Sarah Kane’s ‘4.48 psychosis’ AES+F, 2016-2017 Single channel 4K video
“The whole story is about women brought to the point of hysteria. It’s grotesque and macabre that go as far as becoming humorous. For example, we came up with a cockroach which then became a character in itself. First we created it and only then found out that, in English culture, a cockroach symbolizes the feminine.”
From the interview AES+F
Sarah Kane’s Psychosis 4.48 is one of the key plays in the generation of Britain’s “in-yer-face” drama. The texts of Sarah Kane (1971 – 1999) employed shock, pain and the evocation of a sense of disgust and discomfort in the spectator in order to break down the ever-resistant fourth wall separating audiences from what happens on stage.
Nineteen actress of various ages are cast in this production. They form a choir of inner voices that run the gamut of intonations from irony to hysteria, from malaise or depression to lyricism, sarcasm, farce and grotesque.
Joining director Alexander Zeldovich in an exploration of the limits of female experience are the designers from the AES+F group. Their input makes them full-fledged co-creators of this show.
AES+F’s video material (animated 3D graphics) runs parallel to the text, occasionally matching it in an associative way, occasionally losing touch entirely in a surrealistic way. The poetics of the video content, sometimes fairy-tale like, sometimes horror-like, is filled with images of the archetypal female body – blood, milk, black snow, psychedelic colors and insects.
“This production is a dance macabre, a dance of death, a ritual and a grotesque,” says director Alexander Zeldovich. “The tragic is always the slash where destiny is the numerator, the individual is the denominator, and the remainder of each depends on their faith.”
In Russian with English subtitles.
CAST
Alla Kazakova, Yelena Morozova, Tatyana Nazarova, Serafima Nizovskaya, Anna Antosik, Inna Golovina, Anna Kapalyova, Darya Kolpikova, Anastasia Ksenofontova, Tatyana Maist, Margarita Movsesyan, Lyudmila Rozanova, Tatyana Ukharova, Vera Kuznetsova, Olga Bynkova, Lyudmila Khalilullina, Anna Mavlitova, Yulia Abdel Fattakh, Darya Makarova.
Concept and realization: AES+F
Music and sound effects: Dmitri Kourliandski
Production of this video was realized in frames of “Psychosis 4.48” a common project of Alexander Zeldovich and AES+F
at Stanislavsky Electrotheatre, Moscow (2016) and with support of Ca’Foscari University Foundation, Venice (2017).
Produced by Boris Yukhananov
Production director of CGI and animation: Georgy Arzamasov with support of Scream School
A Russian art group that was formed in 1987 by the conceptual architects Tatiana Arzamasova (1955) and Lev Evzovich (1958) and the multidisciplinary designer Evgeny Svyatsky (1957). Exhibiting abroad from 1989, the group expanded its personnel and name with the addition of the photographer Vladimir Fridkes (1956) in 1995. AES+F achieved worldwide recognition and acclaim in the Russian Pavilion at the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2007 with their provocative “Last Riot”, the first in a trio of large-scale, multichannel video installations that have come to define the AES+F aesthetic. The second of the series, “The Feast of Trimalchio”, appeared in Venice in 2009, and the third, “Allegoria Sacra”, debuted at the 4th Moscow Biennale in 2011. In 2015, AES+F presented the new project “Inverso Mundus” at the 56th Venice Biennale. They have also participated in other signature festivals and biennial exhibitions, including in Adelaide, Havana, Helsinki, Istanbul, Kiev, Lille, Lyon, Melbourne, Sydney and Toronto. Works by AES+F have been shown in solo exhibitions in such prestigious venues as the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (Berlin, Germany), ZKM (Karlsruhe, Germany), Kiasma Museum (Helsinki, Finland), Tate Britain (London, UK), Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum (Madrid, Spain), the Russian Museum (St. Petersburg, Russia), and many others. The group received the Sergey Kuryokhin Award (Russia, 2011) and the main award of the Kandinsky Prize (Russia, 2012).
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