• Part of the PhD-Workshop «Imagination as a Site of Struggle»
In the 19th century, a ruin was a landscape for gothic horror. Today, monsters pervade infrastructure. With sprawling limbs and hulking frames made beyond comprehension, towering oil platforms, writhing wires and bottomless mines are omens of contemporary dread. This performance lecture will present the genre of "infrastructural horror" Anna Engelhard and Mark Cinkevich developed to investigate and expose the infrastructure of expansionism in its inherent monstrosity. As a genre, it aims to create discomfort, repulsion, or suspense by exposing the architecture of dispossession and destruction as a foreboding.
We developed the infrastructural horror to reflect on the core method of our practice, which combines open-source investigations and para-fictional narratives to deal with instances of Russian colonial violence. Having worked against Russian colonial violence before the recent escalation of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we have been rethinking our practice to address the new context of desensitisation to abundant images of violence. What is the new role of an investigatory art practice in such an environment? What does it mean to reconstruct a crime scene, the perpetrator and the process of which is known? How can one make the audience feel for the structural nature of violence when our feeds have been overflowing with graphic imagery?
Hosted by Helen V. Pritchard, Shaka McGlotten, Ines Kleesattel, and Lucie Kolb.
Biography
Anna Engelhardt is an alias of a video artist and writer. Her investigative practice follows the traces of material violence, focusing on what could be seen as the ‘ghost’ of information. The toxic information environments Engelhardt deals with stem from structures of occupation and dispossession. She has an MA in Forensic Architecture and has conducted research into the electromagnetic infrastructure of Russian cyber warfare. She has shown her work at Framer Framed, Amsterdam; ICA, London; Transmediale, Berlin; Ars Electronica, Linz; Kyiv Biennial, Venice Architecture Biennial, BFI London Film Festival, International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, National Gallery of Art, Vilnius; Aksioma, Ljubljana; and V.O Curations, London. Engelhardt is a core faculty member of the MA Information Design at Design Academy Eindhoven.
Mark Cinkevich is an alias of an interdisciplinary artist and researcher from Lahoysk, Belarus. By exploring how infrastructural and social landscapes intersect, he looks into the topics of nuclear colonialism, extractivism, and monstrosity. His practice combines research, investigation, and speculative approaches, with particular attention to the post-Soviet context. His works were presented at Transmediale, Berlin; Steirischer herbst, Graz; BFI London Film Festival, London; National Gallery of Art, Vilnius; Ars Electronica, Linz; and Aksioma Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana among others.