As part of the closing weekend of the exhibition Borders are Nocturnal Animals / Sienos yra naktiniai gyvūnai, the Contemporary Art Centre (CAC) invites you to a special screening of Letter to a Turtledove by Dana Kavelina. The event will take place on Thursday, 11 September from 12 to 8 pm at the CAC Cinema Hall. Entrance with visitor ticket.
Letter to a Turtledove by Dana Kavelina is a short film based on a poem written by the artist. Delivered as a monologue and presented with subtitles, the poem encapsulates the traumas, grievances, horrors, dreams, and hallucinations that have descended upon Ukraine’s Donbas region since its invasion by Russia in 2014. Appropriating amateur footage shot during the conflict, Kavelina’s film weaves sound and image into a poignant tapestry that considers the absurdity of war. The footage is spliced with Kavelina’s own animated segments, staged mise-en-scène, and archival footage of the Donbas from the 1930s. Kavelina’s reimagining of old tropes is a surreal and powerful anti-war film-poem.
Originally conceived as a radio play, ‘Letter’ actually refers to a radio signal, or call, addressed to a woman in the occupied territories. The film is an attempt to build an alternative optics through which to examine the conflict in Ukraine. It is an invitation to understand the war not through the lens of the ‘friend-enemy’ paradigm, but through the ‘rapist-victim’ dichotomy. While victimhood is typically understood as the confiscation or denial of one’s subjectivity, Kavelina’s film proposes victimhood as a status that possesses agency by absorbing and encapsulating violence.
Film details:
20:55 minutes
Single-channel, HD video, colour, sound
Region: Europe
DANA KAVELINA is an artist and activist who works with video, animation, painting, illustration, and text. Through these media, Kavelina injects an artistic component into civic activism and protest. Her work considers vulnerability, personal and collective trauma, as well as historical and cultural perceptions of war that exceed conventional narratives. Her award-winning animated film About Mark Lvovich Tulpanov, Who Talked to Flowers (2017) depicts the events of the military conflict in Donbas, Ukraine through the lens of personal tragedies.