Unknown Text by an Unknown Author in an Unknown Language

The film immerses viewers in Moscow’s art scene from the late 1980s through the early 2000s. We encounter Joseph Backstein’s curatorial experiments, the performances by the Collective Actions group, the practices of the Moscow Conceptualists, poetry readings by Dmitri Prigov and Boris Yukhananov, concerts by Zvuki Mu and Kino, and the creators of “Assa” and “Moscow-Petushki”. Alongside these familiar figures are the unknown witnesses and participants who inhabited that era. Among them is a foreigner working on a dissertation about a medieval manuscript that intersects, strangely, with the present. The past behaves like a fictional world: recognisable, yet never quite coinciding with reality; documentary in appearance, yet impossible to verify. The film was made as part of “Supercut”, the video-essay workshop at Garage Museum of Contemporary Art.