Microscope is very pleased to welcome Moscow-born, Mexico City-based filmmaker and artist Masha Godovannaya to the gallery for a screening of her works. This event is taking place both in person and online and will conclude with a Q&A with the artist.
The approximately 60-minute program features seven short works by the artist completed between 2016 and 2024, and shot on 16mm film and video. Godovannaya’s subtle, introspective but defiant filmmaking assumes a variety of forms and approaches that despite the varied subject matter maintain a poetic foundation. “Only Two Words” (2018) and “a text floating on a river” (2021) are both directly built around poems by Koivo and Eileen Myles, while “What for?” (2022) addresses the Russian-Ukrainian by deconstructing televised images of Putin.
“The City Bridges Are Open Again” (2020) is a tightly edited composition about a utopian “revolution-about-to-happen” made entirely with appropriated footage from the films of Sergei Eisenstein. And “tomorrow I failed completely” (2020) is a more personal work, shot in daily life, that also becomes a document of Godovannaya’s artistic practice and her lockdown experience in Vienna during the pandemic.
In her most recent video “There Is Still More To Come” (2024), which is debuting in New York, the artist walks through the streets of St. Petersburg with two separate cameras shooting the parts of the city that she is permitted to by local authorities. The superimposition of the two perspectives looking at the same portion of reality — a method that is typically used to create illusions of depth — here generates a sense of destabilization and precariousness, reinforced by the sounds of interaction with law enforcement officers recorded along the walk.
Artist in person
Event in person and online
Masha Godovannaya (born 1976, Moscow, USSR/Russia) is an experimental filmmaker, queer-feminist researcher, curator, and educator. Approaching art production as artistic research and collective action, Godovannaya’s artistic and scholarly practices draw on combinations of approaches and spheres such as moving image theory, experimental cinema, and DIY video tradition, social science, post-soviet/postsocialists studies, queer theory, and decolonial methodologies. Godovannaya holds an MFA degree in Film/Video from Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Bard College, USA, an MA degree in Sociology from European University in St. Petersburg, Russia, and a PhD in Practice at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Austria. Godovannaya’s films and visual works have been shown at festivals and art venues such as the International Film Festival Rotterdam, International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, BFI London Film Festival, Ann Arbor International Film Festival, European Media Art Festival, Vienna Shorts Film Festival, Engauge Experimental Film Festival, Experiments in Cinema, Manifesta 10, 7th Liverpool Biennial, Tate Modern, Centre Georges Pompidou, The Ludwig Museum at the Russian Museum, and others. Godovannaya’s works are distributed by Light Cone (Paris), The Collectif Jeune Cinéma (Paris), Filmmakers’ Cooperative (New York), and The CYLAND Video Archive (New York). These works are included in the collections of The State Russian Museum (St. Petersburg), and Österreichisches Filmmuseum (Vienna).