A photo collage by the artist Mykola Ridnyi based on the film Museum Guard (1930)

A VR project by the artist Anatolii Bielov and studio Sensorama based on the lost film Sold Appetite (1928)

Attracting modern artists to re-interpretation of VUFKU film legacy became a separate theme of the exhibition. Collecting fragments of the lost films – documents on the shooting process, individual shots and scenes- artists created new multimedia works.

Working with the VUFKU film Museum Guard (1930), Mykola Ridnyi drew a parallel between the 1920s and the present. In the artist’s interpretation, the film plot about the lack of understanding among the civil war soldiers of the value of the museum collection has something in common with the decommunisation processes of the post-Maidan Ukraine. At the same time, the minimalist form of work gives meaning to different aspects of the colonial and gender criticism of the cinema of the 1920s.

For their part, Anatolii Bielov and studio Sensorama transferred the plot of the lost film Sold Appetite (1927) into virtual reality. Building on the tragicomic plot about an insatiable rich man who ate so much that he had to “rent” someone’s stomach, the artist literally threw the viewer into a mouth stuffed with expensive goods. In this way, the criticism of the anti-bourgeois life of the 1920s resonated with the modern consumption criticism. And the found elements of the film were reunited in an unusual way.