Ira Goryainova

“I was Hamlet. I stood on the coast and spoke with the surf BLABLA. At my back, the ruins of Europe.” After the iconic opening lines of this video, taken from Heiner Müller’s play Die Hamletmaschine (The Hamlet-Machine) (1977), a sharp cut. What follows are photographs of an official World War I commemoration conducted by political representatives. Clearly someone or something is being borne to a grave, while at the same time a voice in the background offers a dramatic reading of Müller’s play. The voice undermines the desired dignity and the political representativeness of the ceremonial by reading lines that glorify violence and destruction, as most of these politicians were trading weapons to all kinds of war zones.

A leitmotif runs through the film The Ruins of Europe (2017) by Ira Goryainova (*1984 Moscow, lives in Brussels): political peace and state order are torpedoed by dystopian images that seem to cause the foundations of democracy to collapse. A storm of media images follows that suggest that society is in a warlike state. The streets burning; there are riots and terror; police are attacking or behaving violently toward innocent people; military marches are seen; and the slogans of right-wing ideologies can be heard. Goryainova used recordings from the media and condensed them into a bleak vision of decline.

The artist contrasts the found film material with her own images, which focus on a female protagonist who refers to Ophelia from the Hamletmaschine and Elektra from Greek myth. Both of these female figures resist what is done to them, in part by patriarchal power structures, and are distinguished by elements of desire.

Ira Goryainova skillfully entangles us in narratives that are constructed like documentaries but are fictional, mirroring the political reality of Europe and give us an unreal feeling how the situation should be judged at the moment and what might still come.