Tuesday, 24 February 2025, marks four years since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. For this date, Contemporary Art Centre (CAC) presents 24 Hour Swan Lake, a day-long screening by artist Sanie Irsay.
In the final decade of the USSR, looped recordings of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake were broadcast across all television channels during moments of political turmoil: the deaths of Soviet leaders and the 1991 coup attempt against Gorbachev. Over time, the ballet became a symbol of political instability and state control. In 2022, TV Rain, Russia’s last independent TV station, aired Swan Lake once again in their final broadcast before being shut down for opposing the invasion of Ukraine.
Sanie Irsay takes this as the departure point for 24 Hour Swan Lake, a reinterpretation of a recording of the Bolshoi Theatre’s 1984 rendition of Tchaikovsky’s ballet Swan Lake, here slowed down to a pace of twenty-four hours. The work slows the ballet to roughly one frame per second, creating a sense of suspension suggestive of a perpetual crisis. Through this slowness, the historical weight of the ballet is recontextualised, echoing contemporary issues. Irsay’s work speaks to the persistent, silent forms of violence through which we are living – the slow emergencies. The duration of the work refers to Douglas Gordon’s seminal work 24 Hour Psycho (1993), in which extreme slow motion dissolves the narrative of Hitchcock’s classic film, interfering with our perception of time. By sharpening our attention to slowness, 24 Hour Swan Lake contrasts the sensational, high-speed mediascapes that surround us today.
SANIE IRSAY (b. 1996) lives and works between New York and Amsterdam. Irsay draws on her heritage as a Crimean Tatar born in Uzbekistan, the indigenous people of Russian-occupied Crimea. Working across sculpture, installation, image, text and site, she is primarily interested in social and spatial structures, zones of inclusion, exclusion, and exception.