Language of Survival. Artist Talk: Dana Kavelina in conversation with Asia Bazdyrieva

03.04.2025 19:30
Language of Survival
Artist Talk: Dana Kavelina in conversation with Asia Bazdyrieva
As part of the exhibition Dana Kavelina. Just Landscape

Dana Kavelina’s exhibition presents her latest film that intertwines history and recurrence, as if time itself was caught in an endless rhyme. At the heart of the film is a Yiddish song about hunger that was written and sung during World War I in Poland. The song uses the metaphor of the wind as a force of destruction—blowing away rooftops, birds, crops, and trees, leaving behind a landscape of desolation. Reappearing during the Holocaust, it gained new significance as an expression of suffering and loss, an echo of a catastrophe unfolding again. In Just Landscape, the song operates as both an auditory and emotional anchor, resonating with themes of displacement, war, and survival.

Dana Kavelina (*1995 in Melitopol, Ukraine) is an artist and filmmaker. She works with text, painting, graphics, video, and installation and produces animated films that explore personal and historical trauma, vulnerability, and perceptions of war outside mainstream narratives. Her works have been exhibited at the Kmytiv Museum; the Closer Art Center, Kyiv; and the Sakharov Center, Moscow. She has received awards at the Odesa International Film Festival and the KROK International Animated Film Festival.

Asia Bazdyrieva (*1986 in Svitlodarsk/Ukraine) is a scholar and writer with a background in art history and analytical chemistry. Her main interest is in the relationship between natural sciences and their seemingly neutral techniques, and the production of imaginaries that span social strata, while shaping politics and poetics of the earth. In 2018-2022, she co-authored ‘Geocinema’—a collaborative project exploring the infrastructures for earth observation as co-producing forms of cinema. Bazdyrieva was a Fulbright scholar in 2015-2017 at The City University of New York, and Digital Earth fellow in 2018-2019; she was also a research fellow at the Bauhaus University Weimar. She is currently pursuing her PhD at The University of Applied Arts Vienna, and serves as an advisor in the Advisory Board of the transmediale festival in Berlin.