THE MACHINE AND THE GARDEN

Larion Lozovoy
A Kyiv-based artist, researcher and writer whose practice illuminatingly interrogates Soviet and post-Soviet history with special emphasis on his native Ukraine, Larion Lozovoy (b. 1987) repurposes eight USSR feature-films (1936-1956) to underline his nation’s role as the “breadbasket of Europe”. Developed as both as film and two-channel installation, the work economically harvests material from such eminences as Medvedkin and Barnet. We see how vast, collectivised wheat-fields dominate bucolic but inescapably man-made landscapes—to the accompaniment of suitably stirring, propaganda-echoing orchestral extracts. (N.Y.)