Unreal Estate By Ksenia Galiaeva

For over 25 years, Ksenia Galiaeva has documented the summer vacations spent with her parents at their dacha in Russia. The images evoke warmth and cheerfulness, but beneath their idyllic surface lies a deeper narrative. The carefully composed scenes create a sense of distance, subtly confronting the silence surrounding persecution during the Nazi era and the intergenerational trauma carried by her Jewish-German-Polish-Russian-Tatar family heritage.

Yet Galiaeva’s long-term project Unreal Estate (single-screen film, 56:59 Min.) is inevitably shaped by the present. The film weaves in footage from Haifa, where her parents got stuck during the COVID-19 pandemic, while Russia’s invasion of Ukraine casts a long shadow over her work of remembrance. Since the war began, returning to the family’s summer home has become impossible. “Unreal Estate” thus emerges as a metaphor for a place that no longer exists - except in memory. Amid the tender imagery, there is a quiet defiance. Galiaeva turns her parents into protagonists of their own story, seeking moments of solace and hope against the weight of history.

The screening will be accompanied by a live voiceover and live music performed by Joachim Badenhorst.

Ksenia Galiaeva (born 1976) is an artist and teaches at Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam. She lives and works in Antwerp and Amsterdam; Joachim Badenhorst (born 1981) is a Belgian jazz bass clarinetist and saxophonist (tenor and soprano), who lives and works in Antwerp.