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A short video by artists Lilia Li-Mi-Yan (Yerevan) and Katherina Sadovsky (Moscow) is a sad, poetic metaphor for what is happening in the world today. The plot and melody of an Armenian lullaby are taken as a starting point, where a mother tries to calm her son by offering to make a symbolic choice of a destiny bird. The boy does not choose peaceful birds, nightingale, or magpie. His predictable choice is a warlike hawk.
The horrors of war are resolutely put out of the brackets of this world without men. It is a gynaeceum, majestic, beautiful and frightening. Nineteen women of different ages wander in a string through the endless desert, re-mastering or forever saying goodbye to the space reminiscent of the fields of past battles. At times, the space collapses into a dark cave, a cramped stage area or a place for prayer. At these moments, the movement of women looks like a mysterious ritual. It seems necessary and meaningful.
Under the alarmingly changing sound of the lullaby, the stones hang in the air, the predatory hawk turns into a drone and the expectation of catharsis increases. The audience, indeed, is brought close to him, and twice. At first, space explodes with a cataclysm, suggesting the fateful presence of higher forces, and later, the glow of sunset is too similar to a fatal explosion of human origin. And it becomes clear that in this story, there is not only a happy end, but there is no end – it is looped, as it should be at video screenings. Here, this usual technique takes on a new meaning and significance. The story begins from the beginning, and the viewer returns to the pile of female bodies that wake up from sleep or get up after death. Folklore motifs of a lullaby are filled with actual meanings, meditativeness – hidden despair.
Lilia Li-Mi-Yan (1971) and Katherina Sadovsky (1985) are a duo of Russian artists who have been working together since 2016, now based in Yerevan, Armenia. Their diverse approach to art practice encompasses art media such as video, CGI, 3D, sculpture, photography, AI, installation, sound, site-specific practices.
In their projects, Li-Mi-Yan and Sadovsky explore questions of the future, ecology, the relationship between humans and Nature, the possibilities of human interaction and connection with other forms of existence.
What happens if we, as a species, have a new body created in interaction with new technologies, materials, bacteria? Will we be eternal, and will we remain the same people? What will happen to the emotions of the new human, posthuman, cyborg...? Will we be able to refuse to reproduce ourselves? Given the rise of medicine and biotechnology, our emotional development is frozen in the capsule of our ancestors. Today we are still hunters and gatherers.
Artists critically analyze these issues, inconveniently intruding into nature with digital images on polymer materials, comparing this art gesture with the attitude of humanity towards non-human agents and the biosphere in general.
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