videocity.bs has pioneered new interconnected pathways within culture, everyday life and the worlds of commerce. Since 2013 videocity.bs has created an annually recurring inner city parcours or has become, in the form of intermittent screenings lasting throughout several weeks every year, an integral, immaterial component of Basel city experience, inspiring unexpected encounters. videocity.bs special will have you astonished this year as well with an extreme contrast programme: the icy Russian winter will be transported into the centre of lively, summery Basel: snowballs and a pair of old men in grey winter clothing who stomp through the snow, meeting countless bathers with their gaily coloured plastic fish bags, who swim along down the waves of the Rhine, as well as thousands of other visitors coming from all over the world. videocity.bs is pleased to be presenting the Basel public with a Swiss premiere again. Yuri Vassiliev is numbered among the most important Russian video artists of today but has never so far been presented here in person before. Under the title of “Last Next Winter” three of his video works are brought together in the GLOBUS Basel display window and four videos on the eBoards of the Congress Center Basel.
Yuri Vassiliev’s central themes are the Russian winter and the Russian Avantgarde colour red. He approaches both of them on a symbolic level. Humans, often as solitary figures and not recognizable as individuals, totter disorientated now here, now there, forming snowballs or being pelted with them or even rolling an enormous snowball, doggedly, with enormous expenditure of effort. The protagonists are exposed to the perils of nature in the videos in existential ways, their doings appearing pointless and cut out of time.
Although it was created independantly and with a view to an interior art space, it is exciting to experience how in the context of videocity.bs new challenges are placed upon the showcased video by the scale and the public space: What influence does the bustling life of the trade fair Messeplatz square exert on our perception of an autonomous work of an artist? The surrounding hustle and bustle amplifies the factors of movement and space within the video. Yuri Vassiliev makes his videos with a small hand camera, which follows the activities of his performers. The field of view sways with every step and sometimes it seems as if the body relations to which we are accustomed, and the familiar relations we associate with these are completely inverted. A face bends down giant-like, appearing from above into the image, some men are going – but though they seem to be striving forwards – apparently in reverse; instead of the protagonist who was now being pelted with snowballs, the observer suddenly sees the world turned white. The video artist undestands how to masterfully transpose the scenes using a sophisticated cutting technique, into the realm of universal human experience. His compositions set up bridges between the eye of the camera and the eye of the spectator and allow us to perceive what we see on a physical level.
Artist: Yuri Vassiliev (*1950 Kingysepp, RUS, lives in Kaliningrad, RUS)
Videos Under the title of “Last Next Winter” four videos are brought together, format 4:3, 1-canal, grouped. The videos have a soundtrack, but during videocity.bs they are however shown without sound on the eBoards, so that the Basel city sounds for once provide their unique sound track:
– “The One Following Me”, 2006, 3 mins. (not shown in the GLOBUS Basel display window)
– “Russian Red White”, 2009, 2 mins.
– “Last Next Winter”, 2011, 4.40 mins.
– “Pokrov” (Cover) 2011, 4.40 mins.
Press Contact Details
Andrea Domesle, curator, a.domesle@gmx.ch, Mobil +41 79 128 23 61
