MARCH

Merilyn Fairskye 2014

Two-channel HDV installation with stereo sound
Duration: 1 x 2 min. loop, 1x 7 min.loop

On 19 March, 2014, Vladimir Putin formally annexed Crimea to the Russian Federation. Since then the political and social situation has remained tense and competing claims have been issued that have not resolved the real differences between Russia and Ukraine that have been brought into focus through this action.

A 2010 visit to Crimea, a territory of Ukraine, initially to gather material for a video about the Black Sea, led to a series of artworks concerned with the aftermath of the Chernobyl explosion, 1000 kilometres north, 25 years before. MARCH is comprised of footage captured then combined with new audio.

MARCH does not directly address any of the large issues buried in the Crimean conflict but instead traces some parts of the key fault-lines between empire and ordinary people in sequences using destabilized/uncertain location footage, subtitles, and sound grabs from Russian and British TV. There is a deliberate sense of agitation in this video. You can never see everything that happens in real time and fragments and excerpts you catch in this footage provide a partial, elliptical, and evocative encounter.

But you do know that on 19 March, 2014, Vladimir Putin formally annexed Crimea to the Russian Federation, and a chained up dog barks. The rest is up to you.

After the events of 17 July, 2014, when Malaysia Airline Flight MH17 was shot down, a postscript was added to the work, in the form of a 4th sequence. The first 3 sequences are altogether 7 minutes long, and are projected onto a large, freestanding screen. The fourth sequence, a 2-minute loop, is displayed on a flat screen monitor on the wall.