VLADA (2023 - ongoing)

4k video, 11 hrs 22 mins

After the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022 we, like so many people, found ourselves glued to our smartphones. This devastating war, which moved quickly from breaking International law to outright war crimes, was immediately recognisable as the most important military conflict in Europe since the Second World War. From our studios in Manchester and Germany we followed the unfolding conflict through a number of Telegram channels and began to collect and sort video materials, categorising them as an way of trying to understand to horror that was unfolding in Ukraine. We did this during 2022 for about six months but at a certain point you start to get overwhelmed, there are simply too many videos of destroyed buildings, communities and lives. Category didn’t cut it.

So we revised our approach and started to focus on a single Telegram Channel as a framework for the project. The resultant work, VLADA, uses all the video's uploaded to the Влада Telegram Channel during the first 365 days of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The downloaded video clips are arranged in chronological order and the work presents a 'core sample' of the conflict. Just as the geologist chooses a point and drills down from a single point to extract a core sample which serves as a depiction of geological time so the VLADA project harvests all the data from a single Telegram channel. It  is not a depiction of a particular battle or atrocity but rather it is a depiction of the war itself.

We are now producing a successor work, essentially an extension of the original film to cover not just the first 365 days of the war, but every day of the war up to the eventual cessation of hostilities. Rather than being simply a film about the war, VLADA will become, in effect, a war memorial, one created from the materials of a digital battlefield.

The version we’ve uploaded here is a fragment of the complete work which will likely have a duration of around 30 to 40 hours. 

Following its premiere at M17 Centre for Contemporary Art in Kyiv it has subsequently been presented at Schloss Wiepersdorf; Detenpyla Gallery, Lviv and Outernet, London. It will also be shown at the Ostrale Biennale, Dresden in summer 2025.