Maria Veits

Maria Veits is based in St. Petersburg and Tel Aviv, and her current interests include migration experiences and strategies of different generations and their reflection in different artistic practices (“Dreamland Never Found”, 3rd Jerusalem Biennial, 2017, TOK’s new project “Russian Bar”). She is also interested in activist practices of young artists that belong to the last soviet generation and the ways they use public space for engaging socio-political discussion (Civic Media Lab, 2016 and 2017, Dnipro, Ukraine). In 2014, Maria curated “Mobile Archive,” a collection of video works traveling across Russia from the Israeli Center for Digital Art – one of the projects that inspired D’EST.

ONLINE: Screening Chapter #2

Performing Words, Uttering Performance

The changing role and function of language before and after the “transition” cannot be discussed without considering the dimension of authoritarian speech acts in the last phase of socialism. Anthropologist Alexei Yurchak shares the observation that during the authoritarian speech act, sign and reference, language and gesture, word and action merge into each other. This thesis is the foundation for an understanding of the variety of linguistic and performative experiments in post-socialist video art. The curators will focus on video works that reflect upon shifts in language and meaning and employ diverse silent, verbal, performative, activist, and other strategies to discuss collective and personal memory, identity, power relations, gender roles, and socio-political change.

→ See the screening dates in the Program