Testimony
Moscow Museum of Modern Art. 2018
The display united Sokol’s works from various years executed in a wide array of media — installations, videos, objects, “performative” drawings and texts. Two monumental installations have been produced outdoors in situ in the museum’s courtyard. Nevertheless, the exhibition is conceived not so much as a traditional retrospective that would aim to represent the artist’s twelve -year period of work, but as a new synthetic project. The video entitled “Testimony” (2015), the running time of which is almost two hours, forms the conceptual and structural centerpiece of the exhibition — in a way, its metastatement. The footage of “Testimony”, separate episodes of which are demonstrated in various rooms in a multi -channel format, are supplemented by object -based and graphic works. All of these — the fragments of already executed projects and series, as well as works especially produced for the present exhibition — transpire to be thematically linked with the main video. The staged for the camera and the materially palpable are intertwined here to form a unified immersive installation. Regular performances by Haim Sokol — reenactments of the video’s key scenes in the museum environment, — and a series of discussions and lectures dedicated to the problems of contemporary memorial culture, form an essential part of the exhibition.
Curators Andrey Egorov and Anya Arutunyan
mmoma.ru/en/exhibitions/gogolevsky_10_2/haim_sokol_testimony/
