"Soap Opera, an ambitious video work by the Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson, is on view for the first time at the project space of Reykjavík's gallery i8, i8 Grandi. The piece is a recording of Santa Barbara: A Living Sculpture, a durational performance which explored immigration, class, war and power through the medium of daytime television, and took place at Moscow's GES-2 House of Culture between December 2021 and February 2022."
"During the performance, Russian and Ukrainian actors recited the lines in Russian inside a former power station, where Ragnar Kjartansson and his team built a sprawling production complex of sets, a costume department, and an editing studio open for visitors to explore during filming. The artist conceived the performance after reading a 2017 article by the Russian-born writer Mikhail Iossel, which delved into the soap opera's cultural significance for residents of post-Soviet Russia in the 1990s."
Soap Opera is a video recording of Santa Barbara: A Living Sculpture, a durational performance that examined immigration, class, war and power through daytime television. The performance took place at Moscow's GES-2 House of Culture between December 2021 and February 2022 and restaged the American soap Santa Barbara, which aired in Russia from 1992 to 2002. Russian and Ukrainian actors recited lines in Russian inside a former power station where a sprawling production complex of sets, a costume department, and an open editing studio was built for visitors. The project was conceived after a 2017 article by Mikhail Iossel about the soap's cultural significance in post-Soviet Russia. The team planned to recreate 99 episodes filmed and edited in a single day to mirror daytime soap rhythms.
Read at The Art Newspaper - International art news and events
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]