Screening: The Short Films of Dana Kavelina

Mark Tulip, who spoke with flowers, 2018, 15 min

Mark L. Tulip was born and raised in Luhansk. He is certain that he will be buried there as well. He has children and a granddaughter, a garden, a cat called Donbas and a dog Malva. However, the political events in Ukraine in 2014 change his habitual way of living: his own family splits into smithereens. Mark L. Tulip intends to live the life on his native land but when the war comes to Luhansk, he has to escape abandoning his garden, the dog and the cat forever. Still, the hardships of new life don't come to the end.

Letter to a Turtledove, 2020, 22 min

Kavelina’s experimental short film combines animation and appropriation of amateur footage shot during the war in the Donbas region of Ukraine, recombining it into a surreal anti-war film-poem.

There are no monuments to monuments, 2021, 35 min

“A monument married a catastrophe and then died, and now catastrophe is left alone, she gets drunk and grins, she is not going anywhere.” There are no monuments to monuments opens with close-ups of the city landscape, surfaces of buildings, blurry light reflections in the puddles, fragments of Kyiv’s monuments. The split screen confronts statements of pedestrians and friends about the life of the city memorials with a performative intervention of the artist climbing on the monuments. Memory is animated but also dismembered by an obsessive desire to inhabit and reappropriate the stony bodies of historical figures.