Ludenscheid, DE: 2.04.2019

_ON the move exhibition of Zuza Banasińska “I didn’t go to Crimea and all I got was this alien message” video

It took place in Museen der Stadt Lüdenscheid thanks to help from Tom Groll of Lichtrouten Lüdenscheid.

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Zuza Banasinska – a Polish artist based in Berlin, Germany.

‘The video “I didn’t go to Crimea and all I got was this alien message” stems from an object I found in Belarus, in the village of Dobrovola. There, in an abandoned cottage, I discovered a photo album created by Boris, who once occupied the house. From various photographs, drawings and stencils in the album, I learned that between 1984-1986 he served in the military in Crimea, in the Soviet Black Sea Fleet. The contents of the album also revealed Boris’s keen interest in the cosmos, focused mainly on the radars near Eupatoria. My research around this object has been an open-ended exploration process. In search for answers to unasked questions, I discovered the first messages ever sent to deep space from this complex of radars. Animating Boris’s drawings, I endowed them with the words broadcast to potential aliens. The result is a digital imagining of the place I’m probing from afar – a space of someone else’s memory, weaved within the contexts that surround it.
By transforming the album into a virtual space of observation of various paths of memory, the time scale and spatial scale have been disturbed and private memories are on an equal footing with interplanetary ones. Messages into space extend the concept of belonging from a family home or country up to the scale of the planet. They designate an extraterrestrial being as the highest measure of alienation. However, isn’t it that more alien is the stranger whom we can meet by invading the territory of his memory?’

Photos: courtesy of Rainer Bien.