Kuba Dorabialski
Invocation Trilogy 2: SEVEN REVISIONISTS
Single channel video with stereo sound, Pan-Slavic ficto-language with English subtitles, 21'29", 2018.
Kuba Dorabialski’s video installation Seven Revisionists (2018) is the second part of his Invocation Trilogy series of video works. The first of the series was Floor Dance of Lenin’s Resurrection (2017), which won the John Fries Award in 2017.
Seven Revisionists continues on from the first instalment, combining themes of political hope and disillusionment, restless myth making and vague, sugary memories of the 20th century socialist project. Shot on the centenary of the October Revolution of 1917, the video takes as its starting point Soviet cinema of the 1970s, distorting it with dance and slapstick.
The titular seven revisionists refer to a photograph of the leaders of the seven Warsaw Pact nations meeting just before the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Speaking a fictional hybrid dialect made up of various Slavic languages, an unnamed narrator recalls intimate memories of each of them (an insincere courtesy, a hostile smatter of gossip, a forgotten flirt in a health spa…). Meanwhile, two young boys cross a vast wilderness in search of a magical, mystical icon that will restore history and deliver us from evil. Finally, in a crescendo of 1970s retro synth sounds, religious incantations and grandiloquent communist phraseology, everything collapses into a single unifying moment of highspeed dance.
First shown at 55 Sydenham Rd
Opening Friday 23 March 2018, from 6pm
Exhibition continues until Sunday 8 April 2018.
Artbank collection, purchased 2018.
Read a review by Aarna Fitzgerald Hanley in runway here.
Actors: Roland, Bruno and Kuba Dorabialski
Project assistance: Katy B Plummer
Bruno's hat made by Szymon Dorabialski
Production help: Szymon Dorabialski
This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body (via 55 Sydenham Rd) and ARC UNSW
Thanks to Jess Browne and Tobias Gilbert for use of car
Thanks to Damian March for gear hire
Thanks to Tobias Gilbert for synthesizer advice
Thanks to Iakovos Amperidis for gallery curtains
Thanks to Dara Gill for lupa media player
Thanks to Kelly Azizi for gallery communication
Thanks to Iwona and Edward Dorabialski for endless help
Filmed on the land of the
- Gadigal people of the Eora nation (Sydney CBD)
- Guringai people of the Eora nation (Dee Why and Frenchs Forest)
- Burra Burra people of the Gundungurra nation (Jenolan and Wombeyan)
- Maloongoola people of the Ngunawal nation (Canberra north)
- The Wiradjuri, Wolgalu, Ngunawal and Monaro Ngarigo people who traveled through and lived in the NSW Alpine region
Always was and always will be Aboriginal land