Please join us on 7th July for the screening & artist talk on site with Chto Delat (Tsaplya Olga Egorova and Dmitry Vilensky)
The screening starts at 18.00 followed by a conversation moderated by Annika Larsson
Songs of Hope and Despair. Performed by Bundschuh, Fish, Fox Tail, Rainbow, Dead Drummer, Muse-Leaving Germany and by other agencies
dir. Tsaplya Olga Egorova
| Germany | 2025 | 82′ |
A group of strangely costumed heroes set out on a journey to find a miracle in this absurdist lo-fi musical roadmovie by the politically engaged art collective Chto Delat. Their experimental flashmob, staged in the former German mining town of Hettstedt, channels the political anxieties of our times.
The politically engaged Russian emigré collective Chto Delat (meaning “What is to be done?” in Russian) goes for Brechtian alienation in their multimedia projects that sit somewhere between experimental cinema, installation work and arty flashmobs. Founded in 2003 in Saint Petersburg, Chto Delat brings together artists, writers, philosophers and choreographers to interrogate the complexities of collective memory and the politics of everyday life.
For their highly experimental roadmovie Songs of Hope and Despair, the Russian exiles took inspiration from two significant historical artworks: Werner Tübke’s The Panorama of the Peasants’ War and Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s film The Niklashausen Journey. Staged in the former German mining town of Hettstedt, their unabashedly lo-fi film is conceived as an improvised fairy tale that reflects on failed revolutions, ecology and the anxieties of our current days. It’s a magical game and absurdist musical in one, in which a group of strangely costumed heroes set out on a journey to find a miracle. Raising the question: what does a miracle even look like in politically dire times like these?
The collective Chto Delat (What is to be done?) was founded in early 2003 in Petersburg by a international workgroup of artists, critics, philosophers, and writers from St. Petersburg, Moscow, Nizhny Novgorod and Berlin with the goal of merging political theory, art, and activism. Since forced emigration of the most of members of the collective due to political prosecution in Russia for its anti-war position in 2022 the collective continues its activity as Chto Delat International and build community in exile and cultivate new forms of collective practice based on open protocol participation. These ideas are implemented at the activities of Chto Delat Emergency Project Room in Berlin. Exhibitions include: 2025 – Utopia The Right to Hope, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg; Planetary Peasants, Kunstmuseum Moritzburg Halle, Germany; Videonale.20 Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany; 2024 – Join in and Sing! About Raising Your Voice, Lentos Kunstmuseum, Linz, Austria; A New Sense of a Shared World, Daejeon Museum of Art, South Korea; 2023 – Family (of Choice). Those Who We Are, Kunstmuseum Ravensburg, Germany; Signals: How Video Transformed the World Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York City 2022 – The Whole Life. Archives & Imaginarie, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin 2021 – Actually, the dead are not dead; Total Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul, South Korea; – What Makes Another World Possible? Tallinn Art Hall, Estonia; – And if I devoted my Life to one of it’s feathers Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna 2020 – 1 Million Rosen für Angela Davis Kunsthalle im Lipsiusbau, Dresden; Becoming A Collective Body MAXXI, Rome, 2019 – Everything That We Have in Common Museum of Contemporary Art Skopje, North Macedonia; – An Opera for Animals Para/Site Art Space, Hong Kong; – Revolution From Without… The 8th Floor, New York City, 2018 Proregress: The 12th Shanghai Biennale China; The Modern Art: 1960–2000. Restart, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow; 2017 MUAC (The Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo), Mexico (solo show 2017); KOW BERLIN (solo show 2022, 2017 and 2015), San Paulo Biennale (2014); Art, Really Useful Knowledge, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (2014); Art Turning Left: How Values Changed Making 1789–2013 – Tate Liverpool, Liverpool (2013); FORMER WEST: Documents, Constellations, Prospects,, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2013); 10th Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju (2012); Chto Delat in Baden-Baden, Staatliche Kuntsthalle, Baden-Baden (2011); Chto Delat Perestroika: Twenty Years After: 2011–1991, Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne (2011); Ostalgia, New Museum, New York (2011); Study, Study and Act Again, Moderna Galerija, Ljubljana (solo show 2011); The Urgent Need to Struggle, Institute of Contemporary Art, London (2010).
