Mediated (I)

Mediated (I) contrasts a documentary artefact with the artistic mediation of what stays outside direct visibility. One of the work's two videos is a fragment of CCTV footage captured in 2022, on the night of the Russian occupation of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant. The footage has a strong visceral effect, gradually making the viewer uneasy. Its materiality and documentary reality carry an inherent violence – yet it is still the least of the violence affecting audiences outside the perimeter of the war, and it is violence that is nevertheless mediated. The counterpart video is built from voice, sound and moving image, and sets out to destabilise the conventional language us to represent war and its language of immediacy. Through this aesthetic mediation, the violence is softened, precisely in order to reveal both its presence and its processing. It also opens up a mental space in which these events, within the totalising logic of war, can be experienced as personal and intimate.

Credits

Composition, sound design, mixing: Conny Frischauf
Video editing: Svitlana Dovbush

Asia Bazdyrieva

Asia Bazdyrieva is a scholar and writer whose work probes the relationship between language and territory. With a background in art history and analytical chemistry, she interrogates the ways in which environments are produced through mediations that intertwine aesthetic regimes, power and technopolitics. Examining the material consequences of these processes on bodies and lands, she seeks to foreground political subjectivities that are often flattened by geopolitical modes of communication. Bazdyrieva is a researcher at the Weibel Institute for Digital Cultures at the University of Applied Arts Vienna and serves on the advisory board of the transmediale festival in Berlin.