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URIEL ORLOW
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| Remnants of the Future, vidéo HD, bande son, 20' en boucle, 2010 (galerie Laure Genillard, Londres) |
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| Orlow’s video focuses on Mush, a housing project just outside of the north Armenian town of Gyumri. Mush is named after the once flourishing Armenian town in Eastern Anatolia, which in 1915, during the Armenian genocide, became the site of massacres and deportations. Construction of the 'new' Mush began a few months after the major Spitak earthquake of 1988 destroyed many of Gyumri's housing blocks and made thousands of people homeless. Promised by M. Gorbachev to be completed within two years, construction of the new Soviet-style suburb eventually came to an abrupt halt as the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and the Russian construction workers were recalled by Moscow. The newly independent Armenian state did not have the means to finish this ambitious housing project and it has since remained in a ghostly state of incompletion and near desertion, inhabited by inhabited by migrating birds and gleaners who eek out an existence by slowly dismantling the Soviet style housing blocks. The video is accompanied by a sound-scape by Mikhail Karikis using the radio waves emitted by dying stars (pulsars), which still reach us after the star has died and which were first mistaken for intelligent life messages from outer space. |
