18:00 – 20:00 | Film Screening in the History Meeting House

Moderator: Zuzanna Bogumił

Artists:
Julia Simonchuk, Testimony of CHAIKA-II (2025), Background (2025)
Äsel Kadyrkhanova,  All the Dreams We Dream (2021)
Maria Kapajeva, The enforced memory (2022)

• Julia Simonchuk, Testimony of CHAIKA-II (2025), Background (2025)

Julia-Anna Simonchuk grew up in Kyiv, Ukraine and has been a Londoner for six years now. She graduated from BA Fine Art course at CSM and is currently finishing a Fine Art MA at the Slade. She is working with sculpture, collage, installation, printmaking, socially-engaging projects and currently she is predominantly focusing on moving image.  Among Julia’s thematic interests are questions of power, ideology, memorialisation, presence and absence, hauntology, social dancing and time.

Testimony of CHAIKA-II (2025)

In the short film ‘Testimony of Chaika-II’, the protagonist is an old photo camera, which is granted subjectivity and a voice. The camera is an artifact from a collection of Museum of Occupations and Freedom Fights in Vilnius, Lithuania (former KGB and Gestapo headquarters). Chaika-II is talking about what it saw but couldn’t capture and is reflecting on the uses of technology, nature of documentary photography, as well as agency and complicity.

Background (2025)

‘Backgrounds’ is aresponse to the Museum of Occupations and Freedom Fights (former KGB headquarters and detention centre) in Vilnius. This work is an attempt to address emotionally charged stories and histories through the language of the abstract.

The cells and corridors have typical institutional walls – divided into two colour sections. When encountered from up close, the area where one colour meets another can look like austere and deserted fields. The palimpsests of earth are preserving the evidence of violence and so are the layers of paint on the walls (repainted about 20 times to cover blood and inscriptions).

• Äsel Kadyrkhanova,  All the Dreams We Dream (2021)

Assel Kadyrkhanova is a visual artist and researcher, currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis. Her artistic practice spans drawing, textile, video and animation. Her research interests include autoethnography, visual storytelling, affect and haptic visuality. Her work addresses postcolonial hauntings, the burdens of silenced histories and unmourned personal losses.

All the Dreams We Dream (2021) is a hand-drawn animation film that discusses the (non-) memory of the Kazakh famine, 1930 – 1933. Caused by the Soviet policies of collectivisation, the famine was an event of such extremity that it shattered the very foundations of Kazakh nomadic society, making it easier to Sovietise the region. Throughout the film, the focus remains on the subtle boundary between animal and human and between human and non-human. As it explores the relationship between image, sound and text, it aims to construct a counter-narrative or a space for resistance to the dominant ideological narratives of the Soviet cultural production it references.

• Maria Kapajeva, The enforced memory (2022)

Bio: Maria Kapajeva (she/her) is an artist who works between the UK and Estonia, while exhibiting her works internationally. Through her artistic practice, Kapajeva looks at the identity and gender questions of peoples being in-between or in-transition, often bringing peripheral stories to the visible centre. Kapajeva practice is multidisciplinary: she works with found and vernacular photographic images, video installations, textile and embroidery and participatory practices.

The enforced memory (2022)

The video is artist’s personal reaction on the events of August 2022, which took place in Estonia, in Narva, her home town. Since the war in Ukraine escalated, the removal of Soviet monuments in Estonia became intensively debated topic. The tank monument in Narva became a stumbling block between the views of different communities within the country. It has especially became symbolic and problematic because it stood right at the border with Russia, on a riverbank of Narva river, facing Estonia. This video is artist first attempt to express a personal take on the events and the war, happening at this moment in Ukraine.