Karussell – Installations

21 – Remembrance of growing up
Mats Staub

Studio Ost/Ecksalon Ost | Video installation

What year did you turn 21? What happened in this year? And how did you grow up? Mats Staub takes a lot of time to talk to people of different ages about his questions. After three months, he visits his protagonists again: while he plays the sound recordings he has written for them, he films the reactions in the faces of the listeners. “21” is a long-term project and expands from place to place. With this, the collection of individual portraits grows, creating an extraordinary gallery of the past and present century. In Dresden, Mats Staub talks to people with a Russian biographical background and develops five new portraits.

Mats Staub (*1972, Muri near Bern, Switzerland) studied theatre, journalism and religious studies in Bern, Fribourg and Berlin. Since 2004 he has been developing longterm and art projects in the field of tension between theatre and exhibition, science and literature.

Silent Violence
Daria Serenko

Studio West | Action Art

The young artist Daria Serenko, in addition to her participation in the discussion on Political Action Art in Russia on the afternoon of 12 January 2020, will meet with women’s initiatives and employees of crisis centres on domestic violence in the following week and research how this problem is dealt with in Dresden. In the end, one of her art actions on gender-specific violence, with which she has also become known in Russia, will take place. In her work “tichie pikety” (silent (strike) posts), she was on the road in public transport and on the streets of Moscow with posters drawing attention to homophobia and domestic violence.

Daria Serenko (1993) is a poet, curator and graduate of the Gorky Literature Institute.

Graphical Report – A Mural
Victoria Lomasko

Ecksalon West | Live painting

The artist Victoria Lomasko will move into a studio in the Festspielhaus Hellerau from 7 to 20 January and work on a mural during this time. Lomasko deals with social graphics. Since 2008 she has been developing the genre of “graphic report” that existed in pre-revolutionary Russia and the Soviet Union and disappeared after their collapse. As an artist and activist, she collaborates with the media and human rights organizations. She travels through Russia and former Soviet republics and investigates the private, psychological and spiritual lives of various fringe groups. Her heroes and heroines are sex slaves from Nizhni Novgorod, women from secret lesbian clubs, teachers of an abandoned village school, prisoners of a penal colony for minors and people, especially women, from the post-Soviet region.