Microreview: Memory and Stasis in Abkhazia

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Still from This You Must Remember (2022), multi-channel film installation with sound by Rob Godman, colour, 38’36”
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Still from This You Must Remember (2022), multi-channel film installation with sound by Rob Godman, colour, 38’36”
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Still from This You Must Remember (2022), multi-channel film installation with sound by Rob Godman, colour, 38’36”
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Installation view, Sam Jury & Anton Ochirov, This You Must Remember (2022), mixed media exhibition, DEPO Istanbul. Photo courtesy Asida Butba.
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Installation view, Sam Jury & Anton Ochirov, This You Must Remember (2022), mixed media exhibition, DEPO Istanbul. Photo courtesy Asida Butba.
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Installation view, Sam Jury & Anton Ochirov, This You Must Remember (2022), mixed media exhibition, DEPO Istanbul. Photo courtesy Asida Butba.
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Installation view, Sam Jury & Anton Ochirov, This You Must Remember (2022), mixed media exhibition, DEPO Istanbul. Photo courtesy Asida Butba.
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'Gudauta' by Sam Jury, page from the booklet accompanying the exhibition This You Must Remember, mixed media exhibition, DEPO Istanbul, 2022/2023
Date
2023 February
Subtitle
Asida Butba reviews Sam Jury & Anton Ochirov, This You Must Remember, mixed media exhibition, DEPO Istanbul, 8 November 2022–9 January 2023.
Type
microreview
Author / Publisher
Asida Butba for NewsLibrary
Author Info

Asida Butba is co-founder of and a curator at SKLAD, the first contemporary art space in Abkhazia. SKLAD is a self-organized initiative, working at the conjunction of art, education and international cooperation with the aim of providing the best structure to support the capital Sukhumi’s creative minds in the context of scarce resources and international isolation.

@_sklad/

Language

English

Also published here

Newsletter No. 51

Instagram @sarn_switzerland

Reviewed Publication

Sam Jury & Anton Ochirov, This You Must Remember, mixed media exhibition, DEPO Istanbul, 8 November 2022 – 9 January 2023.

https://www.depoistanbul.net


*Click the button below to view the exhibition catalogue as a PDF download

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The heart of the exhibition is a 3-channel video installation by Sam Jury. The piece focuses on body memory and features recollections of the first day of 1992-1993 Georgian-Abkhaz war as told by the people Jury encountered in Sukhum during her research trip in 2017. Her visuals, shot on location in Abkhazia, are either extreme close-ups or shots from afar, as if depicting an out-of-body experience. Newly shot material melts into archival footage via complex montage. Rob Godman’s sound composition maintains the sense of fear and disorientation instigated by image layering and nervous camera movement. Mundane situations are experienced as estranged and surreal. The recurring theme is the struggle to interpret or contextualize the signs of crushing reality. Jury’s work investigates the slow violence of the frozen conflict where feelings and events seem to be stuck in a loop without much chance of moving on.

While Jury keeps an almost claustrophobic focus on the anxiety imprinted in her respondents, Anton Ochirov expands this view through poetry rooted in the stasis of Abkhazia’s isolation and inspired by the borderless, fragmented and fluid digital space. Ochirov’s poetic texts, challenged to be experienced as part of the physical exhibition, are printed on glass atop stands and hung as posters on the walls. Stepanakert, Mariupol, Kabul, Gudauta—peripheries and semi-peripheries in slow or fast violence—are placed alongside each other. An eerie mirroring of the space of Ochirov’s empathy, where they intersect within the ongoing death of an empire.