The Last March immersive video installation combines the tragedy of the war and "missing in action" soldiers with the joy of the victory, coupling them with artists' interpretation of this collective history's influence on our lives today. The project is a collaboration of artists of two different generations: Naum Medovoy (1937), who survived WWII, and Nikita Shokhov (1988) and Oleg Makarov (1984), who are two generations younger. Medovoy immigrated from the USSR to the US over 40 years ago, where he became known as a documentary filmmaker and artist. For many years he dedicated himself to revising the conventional representation of the Second World War in art. The upcoming exhibition continues his renowned Last March cycle that included a documentary film and a series of works on paper. Creating a large-scale video installation was our deliberate choice because video is a medium whose language has a strong appeal to young viewers.

A picture without a story is never art. The difference between contemporary art and other forms of artistic creativity is in its presenting works that always keep a trace, either material or conceptual, of the artist who made them. Ignoring the personal, the maker, and where his/her unique vision of the world maturated from, reduces the work to a mere soulless object, a decoration of the everyday, which does not transcend the boundaries of the functional.
It is also true that the complexity of a work of art cannot be expressed in one single story only. However, biography is usually one of them, an essential starting point – never the finish line, of course.

Naum Medovoy was born in the Soviet Union. He came of age in the troubled years where people were busy rebuilding their lives on the ashes of a devastating war that had reshaped the consciousness of the whole humankind. To young Naum, the Cinema became his vision of the world in those years. In particular, he started to investigate the recorded image as an historical document and managed to master its visual and narrative power on viewers. However, as an artist as well as a man of ideals, he could not conform to the dictates of the State, which permitted Socialist Realism as the only possible canon in art. All forms of artistic expression which were not socialist in content and realist in form were banned and transgressors persecuted and often punished with imprisonment. It was the moral duty of each writer, artist, musician and director to offer the Soviet citizens books, paintings, music, and films that would speak of the happiness of building the greatest and most democratic country on the planet.

The series of works on paper "The Last March" had a gestation of thirty-five years, from 1972, the year when its foundations, the 25-minute documentary film "The Missing (The Last March)", were laid, to 2007, when the series was started.

The filmmaker's home (the Soviet Union) and the artist's home (the USA) had gone through radical changes. The whole world had radically changed. In 2007, the Cold War that had made the two countries enemies had been finally left to history books. Most importantly, enough time had passed for Naum to unburden himself from the paralyzing heavy weight of memories that belonged to his own past and use the 1972 documentary film to tell a new story, a story that this time needed to be told in the contemporary art space, no longer in the cinema hall (or on the television screen). The historical material on film could finally become something more intimate and personal. The objective could now offer a platform for the subjective. The story of many people could become the story of one person.

CREDITS

Naum Medovoy - author
Nikita Shokhov - video artist
Oleg Makarov - composer
Antonio Geusa - curator
Anna Evtiugina - curator, producer
Oksana Salamatina - gallerist, producer
Oksana Kotova - communications
Kate Selenkina - film scanning
Kate Romanova - immersive installation R&D

Filming group in Berlin:
Nikita Pavlov, Konstantin Ferdman

Filming groups in Moscow:
Anna Kortyukova, Artyom Go, Viktoriya Chernyavskaya, Kirill Proskuryakov, Theodore Guerlain, Denis Spiridonov, Vasiliy Sumin
Performers Moscow streets:
Taras Burnashev, Alexander Sutyagin, Yury Kordas,
Dmitry Volkov, Alexey Smyslov, Kristina Petrova,
Vera Shelkina

Filming groups in New York:
Alexey Kurbatov, Nikita Shokhov, Anna Evtiugina, Naum Medovoy
Performers New York streets: Brian O'Mahoney, Kate Eberstadt, Katy Pinke

Filming flowers:
Aleksey Kurbatov, Nikita Shokhov, Konstantin Lyubimov, Anna Evtiugina

Women's performances:
Natalia Obelchak - choreographer
Natalia Zhukova, Alina Guzhva, Julia Vvedenskaya, Asya Ashman, Sofia Zaika - performers
Maxim Mikheev - cinematographer
Anna Smirnova - costume designer
Alexandra Zinchenko - set designer
Vera Baratova - make-up artist
Kirill Vdovin - hair stylist

Partners:
RENTAPHOTO, Rodchenko Art School, Panasonic, Eidotech, Du-All Camera, Gosfilmofond, net-film.ru