Tape 158: New Documents From The Archives is a constellation of works in collage, assemblage, and collapse. The exhibition is anchored in my repetitive and collaborative responses to a 1991 auto-ethnographic videotape – unfinished, untranslated, and badly-made – found in a Russian Mennonite archive in Winnipeg, Treaty 1 territory. Simply labeled Tape 158, this video footage moves through a small village in southeastern Ukraine, inquiring about its histories, materialities, architectures and possibilities at the edge of a post-Soviet moment. This ‘found’ footage forms the foundation for the exhibition’s central work, Green Fields, a re-filming of the footage in the same village twenty-five years later. This sense of cyclical return runs throughout the exhibition; a doubling and an echo, at once familiar and estranged, made site-specific to the conditions of lockdown and closure.
Green Fields
2016-2019, 16’00, two-channel SD video, colour, stereo sound
Green Fields is grounded in a 1991 auto-ethnographic videotape – unfinished, untranslated, and badly-made – found in a Russian Mennonite archive in Winnipeg, Treaty 1 territory. Simply labeled Tape 158, the footage moves through a small village in southeastern Ukraine, inquiring about its histories, materialities, architectures and possibilities at the edge of a post-Soviet moment. Filmed in the village of Zelene Pole in the summer of 2016, I worked with a small crew and local women to re-film the footage in the same locations, following the original cameraman’s movements like a score. The resulting installation is an experimental essay that shifts through future-past narrative modes, asking how body, nation, and time are defined within and without us.
Instructions
This online-based iteration of Green Fields asks you to install and view the work on two screens using computer, tablet or smartphone. Both devices require an internet connection.
1. In a dark environment, set your two device’s brightness and volume to a comfortable level. Turn off notifications, or enable Do Not Disturb.
2. Launch Video 1 on one of your devices and Video 2 on the second. Activate fullscreen mode.
3. Place one of your devices in front of you, preferably a computer screen, and your second device leaning towards you, or in your hands.
4. Play both videos at the same time. The aim is to watch both videos synchronized with one another.
If you use only one device to view the video installation, open Video 1 in a regular browser window, and open Video 2 in an incognito or private browser window.
If you do not have access to multiple devices or a sustained internet connection, please email the artist for a different version of the work at kandisfriesen@gmail.com.
En düsent, en hundat
2021, pigment print on canvas, dimensional lumber, drywall, primer, LED lighting, hardware, 228 cm x 244cm x 488 cm, constructed by Samuel Garrigó Meza.
Location: vitrine installation at articule (262 Fairmount West), visible day and night.
En düsent, en hundat is a constructivist billboard, broadcasting an image day and night from the gallery’s storefront windows. Its title translates to a thousand, a hundred, announcing two time frames held at once: the ancient Khortitsa oak tree, and the Stalinist Dniproges dam, both located in the city of Zaporizhia, Ukraine. Since it’s construction in the early Soviet era, the Constructivist-designed concrete dam has flooded the large upper basin, keeping whole villages, cemeteries, and architectures underwater, and causing the ancient tree’s roots to slowly rot. In a late attempt to save the oak, the city applied concrete to it’s broken limbs, and installed metal masts and ropes for its branches, producing the strange image of a ship-like monument holding up a tree drowning on dry land. The sculptural installation in the gallery amplifies the monumental effects of the dam, built with Canadian and US hydroelectric expertise that was gleaned from colonial dam projects in both countries, on stolen, flooded land.
What Is To Be Done, Then?
Kandis Friesen and Indu Vashist
2021, text, newsprint, distribution, each 41 cm x 55 cm, limited edition of 2000
Location: newspaper rack at articule (262 Fairmount West), available day and night.
What Is To Be Done, Then? is a collaborative artist text, responding to a repeated question through citation and collage. Emerging from our correspondence over the last year, the publication is an extension of the project Extended Indefinitely. The newspaper is available on the front steps of articule, posted on various public walls around the city, and as a downloadable PDF.
Extended Indefinitely – Kandis Friesen and Indu Vashist
2020-2021, writing, sound, video, collaboration, mixed media
Extended Indefinitely is a loosely ongoing project between Kandis Friesen and Indu Vashist, working with sound, writing, collaboration, and collage. The first iteration of the exhibition Tape 158: New Documents From The Archives was scheduled to open at TRUCK Contemporary Art (Mokhintsis/Calgary) on the day the pandemic was announced in March, 2020. Instead, the exhibition remained in a state of extended storage. Friesen and Vashist used this provisional space to write back into each other’s work, embracing the disjointed segments, associative memories, and cyclical citational forms central to the original Tape 158 exhibition. You can visit Extended Indefinitely hosted by TRUCK Contemporary Art here:
The artist would like to thank everyone who assisted in making this work: especially Zelene Pole residents Lyudmila Kostyryova, Nadezhda Pavlenko, Aganetha Kolyushenkova, Walter Wiebe, and Fyodor Laboon, Indu Vashist, Conrad Stoesz and the Mennonite Heritage Archives, Serhiy Homonyuk, Rudy Friesen, Liliya Belousova, Viktor Penner, Vadim Koranevsky, Iryna Kuzmenko, Tamara Filyavich, Nahed Mansour, Aganetha Dyck, Heinrich Siemens, Ali El-Darsa, and everyone at TRUCK Contemporary Art and articule.
The artist acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts in the research and realization of this work.
Kandis Friesen works with the dispersed monumental. Her compositions build from architectural, material, and spectral inhabitations of exile, amplifying minute and myriad histories at once. In recent work in sculpture, writing, video, and sound, she uses history as a central material, proposing collaged frameworks for structural resonance, repositioning, and dis/repair.
Indu Vashist has served as the Executive Director of SAVAC since 2013. She is interested in art that is not precious and words that are precise.
This exhibition is presented as part of the winter programming of articule, an accessible artist-run center dedicated to social engagement, experimentation and interdisciplinarity.
articule
262 Fairmount W., Montreal Quebec
Canada H2V 2G3
514 842 9686
articule.org