Sid Iandovka

Iandovka’s works have always been structurally experimental: a direct meditation on the act of viewing, rather than conceptual decoding, cinematic deconstruction, or “avant-garde collage”.  

 Appropriating the language of dreams, his wordless emotive films deal with the fragmented and the random, with memory and loss. His recent works are stitched together from visual fragments undergoing varying levels of manipulation and continual reconstitution; only here, fragmentary does not precede the whole but exists beyond and after it. Their complex relations are punctuated by sound always composed by the artist himself.  Marked by a highly developed and peculiar montage style, disquieting and entrancing, these short films create an emotionally charged metaphoric fabrication of reality – although the only metaphor here is optical.

 The artist works with his own archive of video footage – going back to the 90s and capturing his time in Novosibirsk, in America, and in Europe – interspersing it with a diverse range of found material and imagery of his own construction. Often leaving his films pointedly and perpetually open-ended, he works on several films in parallel over a prolonged period of time, as well as reworks and remixes completed pieces – layering personal previous intentions, haunting personal story, and history.

*Schwimmen– an experimental video art and music group was active in 1991-94. Sid Iandovka, Anna Tsyrlina, and Pavel Peretolchin began as an improvisational guitar noise band, soon moving on to psychedelic industrial music. With the arrival of a Video8 camcorder, they start to include video art projections in their shows. They made a montage inside the camcorder through a “video-micsher” and didn’t use the computer at all till 1995. At that time when they made their experiments with video, they didn’t know anything about what video art is.

Schwimmen played a handful of shows in their hometown Novosibirsk and in such legendary Moscow clubs as Sexton, Bunkr, Third way/Третий путь, where they befriended the like-minded Alien Pat. Holman. Also Sid vidjeing in Ptuch.