People of No Consequence, 2016
Video, 8:34 min
Keicheyuhea, 2017
Video, 19:37 min
The video works People of No Consequence and Keicheyuhea articulate the question of how a survivor of a traumatic event – collectively in People of No Consequence – can testify about his or her experience, and what we can see – personally in Keicheyuhea – when someone looks into the past. Both works consider the carriage of memory and loss in different ways. During the Second World War, Soviet authorities organized and carried out the forced resettlement of entire populations within the USSR, including several nations from the North Caucasus and Crimea. At the outset of the video People of No Consequence, we regard the interior of a municipal hall in Grozny filled with empty chairs. The video lasts 8 minutes and 34 seconds, the length of time it takes for 119 elderly Chechen survivors of the deportation, ranging from 73 to 105 years of age, to enter the room and take their seats. The group faces the camera, but they do not speak to us.
In Keicheyuhea, the lens of the camera follows a car with a woman as she travels in the mountainous district of southern Chechnya, to see the site of her ancestral village for the first time since 1944. As she gets out of the car and comes nearer to the actual spot she scans the austere landscape, trying to identify familiar traces, and says, “There is nothing to see.” There is a world of a difference between what the woman eventually recognizes and what the artist, the camera and the viewers are not able to see. She arrives, her memories animate the place, and as she leaves it, after a short interval, the site is transformed from the silence of history back into the silence of nature.
