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"Angelus Novus Novus" is a video art about a contemporary angel of history. The starting point of the project was Paul Klee's painting "Angelus Novus" and "Theses on the Philosophy of History" by Walter Benjamin.

In this video work I would like to touch upon one of the most important aspects of understanding the humankind – our history. What is happening now is the most global event since 1945. But the main problem of today is that we live in an era of absolute manipulation and false pictures of the world, we (the humankind) do not have access to reality, and we do not know what is actually going on. Therefore, touching the memory of history or recollection can help us now to find our way in the present.

Working with a minimalist aesthetics and romantic sensibility, I explore the relationship between the history of the past century and the present. The general perception of time in the video is deliberately slowed down; the video is filmed in reverse, referring to the time continuum of movement of cyclical spiral patterns and repetitions, which were mentioned back in the ancient Greece.

The video begins with a quote from Dürer’s "Melancholy" as a prototype of the Western world. Today, the Western world is facing an unprecedented challenge. It is likely that Albrecht Dürer was thinking about the possibility of such events, and after almost 500 years his idea was picked up and developed by Lars Von Trier in his film about the planet Melancholy as an impending and inevitable catastrophe for the Earth.

There is an almost motionless Angel in the room. Objects and symbols, which were so widely discussed by Dürer's work researchers (scientists, philosophers and art critics), are no longer there. Some of the objects might be broken, something might be hidden in a suitcase. Maybe this is a metaphor of the end of history, nobody knows. The Angel is holding a dry rose that symbolizes the transience of this life, and then she leaves it on the stairs – the only object in the room from Dürer's painting as a symbol of connection between heaven and earth. One can feel a tremendous inner strength of the Angel, and obeying this creative force and restlessness, she straightens up, gets up and, before leaving this room forever, throws a farewell glance at the ideal cloud, association with the idea of creation, with the purity of ideals and moral freedom of the times of the Renaissance. After passing through the corridor from light into darkness and going down the stairs, the Angel looks at us through the grid, which Rosalind Krauss described as a special spatial structure that has become anti-natural, anti-mimetic and anti-real, displacing any lifelike symbol of our time.

Having overcome the grid, the Angel breaks through the space of freedom and walks against the background of an old factory. On the one hand, this old building symbolizes the past, which was once considered advanced technology and was very useful. Now, abandoned and destructed, it remains motionless and empty – still beautiful and impressive, but useless.

And only having escaped from the ruins of the old industrial world, the Angel stops and looks into our faces as if from Paul Klee's painting "Angelus Novus", as if saying goodbye to us, to people. Perhaps she is forever leaving this world of progress, like in Benjamin's vision of progress as destruction.

The Angel is destined to leave this world and dissolve in the light of the sun, but she makes one last attempt to correct this world for the better by moving a stone. Once a wise man said that there is no need to destroy and rebuild everything for the peace to rule on earth; it is enough to just slightly move a cup, or wood, or stone.

Before disappearing in the rays of the setting sun, the Angel raises her hand dividing the ray from the sun by five, symbolizing that the future is happening now.

We live at a turning point and the world is changing right before our eyes. International institutions are being dismantled, and it seems that the entire system, not only globalization but also capitalism is falling apart. What will happen to humankind, will it transform beyond recognition? Nowadays we are speaking to our digital assistants, and our faces are being recognized by ubiquitous cameras, and many people are scared of a pandemic on one hand, and of digital totalitarian control on another. History is happening every day, and tomorrow starts the day before. Time is already compressed like a spring and it seems that the history is ready, at some mutated point, to repeat itself again.

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