Psychosis

Info

Media

Concept

Info

2016–2018

Video set design for theater, single-channel video installation (18′14″),

mixed reality installation / performance (approx. 18′), 4 video stills

Media

Theater set
Stills
Installation

Concept

Psychosis addresses such themes of the 1990s as corporeality, psychedelics, and social protest through the prism of contemporary digital technologies and aesthetics. The project takes its inspiration from the text of the play 4:48. Psychosis by cult British playwright Sarah Kane, written in a psychiatric clinic in early 1999, shortly before her suicide. Kane suffered from clinical depression and crippling self-loathing; her final play is often interpreted as an illustration of her mental state as she battled with an insatiable desire for love and contemplated taking her own life. Together with Alexander Zeldovich, AES+F first reimagined the play for the Moscow Electrotheatre Stanislavsky with an original concept performed as a cacophony of 19 voices and an entirely CGI video set design with a modular system of screens. Subsequently, the collective produced a mixed reality installation with a performance component, as well as a stand-alone video work derived from their set design. The music and sound effects for both the theater performance and the later installations were composed by Dmitry Kourliandski based on micro-fragments of Brahms’s German Requiem. In the mixed reality installation, the viewer is greeted by a performer in medical scrubs set in a space resembling a corridor of a mental health facility, complete with various paraphernalia one might find in such a place. The performer ceremoniously straps the viewer into a wheelchair that is fixed on its axis and helps them into the virtual reality headset. The viewer is then transported inside the surrealistic visions of Sarah Kane’s protagonist, embarking on a psychedelic journey that begins in the corridor and then transitions into the virtual space, navigated by way of the wheelchair. The single-channel video work is more closely based on the set design, employing the same visual material, its narrative structure loosely aligned with that of the stage play. The poetics of the visuals in both the virtual reality and video works oscillate between the fairytale-esque and the terrifying, filled with images of the female body, blood, black snow, mushrooms, and cockroaches The single-channel video installation premiered at Ca’ Foscari University in Venice during ArtNight in 2017, while the mixed reality installation was first shown in Moscow at MARS Center of Contemporary Art (2017), on exhibition Here and Now! at Manege Central Exhibition Hall in Moscow (2018), and subsequently traveled to the 2018 Rencontres d’Arles festival and the Geneva International Film Festival in 2019.