Kuba Dorabialski

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.

​

​