Arsen Zhilyaev’s total installation, informed by his long-standing interest in the politics of time and institutional critique, has been developed in conversation with Pushkin House’s archive. It addresses political memory, collective responsibility and the active denial of official state narratives. The total installation consists of a silent film, a photographic study of the Pushkin House archive, vinyl wall prints and a sound work, immersing the audience in an absurdist dream.

Arsen Zhilyaev’s silent 16mm film, developed by the artist with the assistance of Artificial Intelligence (AI) software, immerses the viewer in a surreal dream. Subtitled in German, the film sets an eerie atmosphere following the imagined prohibition of the Russian language in post-war Russia, positioning German as the new “neutral” lingua franca and the official language of communication.

The experimental sci-fi film takes inspiration from the lost anti-war film Meat Grinder, Film #1 by Klimenty Mintz and Alexander Razumovsky, first presented at a gathering of the avant-garde group OBERIU (Union of Real Art, an avant-garde collective of Futurist writers in Leningrad) in 1928, and materials found in the archive of Pushkin House, such as letters, administrative reports, photographs, and complaints about lack of funding – painting a multifaceted picture of the cultural institution in the context of a rapidly changing political landscape. Specifically, the materials from 1984 are in focus, apophenically (as if drawing lines between seemingly unrelated things), connecting the project to George Orwell’s novel.

Apart from the disorienting dreams, multiple Alexander _ns from alternative realities, and reinterpretation of Meat Grinder, the film includes the semi-fictional artworks of the imaginary Refuseniks art group (a term originally designated to Jews who were refused the right to emigrate from the Soviet Union by the authorities – and reinterpreted anew by Zhilyaev in this context), who used refusal to comply with the state ideology as a tool for resistance.

Sat atop the piano in the Music Room, a record player blasts an AI-interpreted soundtrack based on Marlene Dietrich’s anti-war anthem, Sag mir, wo die Blumen sind (Where Have All the Flowers Gone), creating an uneasy cacophony with the mechanical stuttering of the antique 16mm projector, produced in the 1970s, which beams the film onto the wall.