Invocation Trilogy 1: Floor Dance of Lenin’s Resurrection (2021)

Overview

Set in the early 1980s, this depicts a man living in a fictitious amalgam of several Eastern European states. The man is being interviewed by another man, with both roles played by the artist, Kuba Dorabialski. The interview is conducted in a fictional Pan-Slavic language devised from an ‘irrational’ mix of Polish, Ukrainian, Russian, Serbo-Croat and Bulgarian. The conversation of the two men starts formally, but quickly devolves into a rumination on social responsibility, sincerity, and the limits of language. It ends in an ecstatic pseudo-mystical dance and an introduction to a pair of angels: representatives of 1917 and 1991; bookends of the Eastern European 20th century socialist project.

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