Dana Kavelina
Dana Kavelina
Dorothea Schlegel Artist in Residence
Research Area 1: "Competing Communities"
October – December 2022
Y-2122
Dana Kavelina's project at the EXC 2020 "Temporal Communities" will see her develop a poetic text – also a script for a future film – that envisions a utopian perspective on Ukrainian society after the war with Russia is over. The text expands on the cybernetic ideas of Victor Glushkov and the architectural visions of Fedir Tetyanych and Yona Friedman as well as the general notion of bringing back the dead by means of technology.
It presents a utopian, classless society of the future that, freed from the need to work, dedicates itself to working on collective trauma and commemoration.
Dana Kavelina was born in 1995 in Melitopol and was based in Kyiv\Lviv, Ukraine, but is currently living in Germany. She is a graduate of the Department of Graphics at the National Technical University of Ukraine. She primarily works with animation and video, but also uses installation, painting and graphics. Her works often thematize military violence and war seen from a gender perspective and address the position of the victim as a political subject, as well as the distance between historical and individual trauma, memory and misrepresentation. Her works have been exhibited at the Kristianstads konsthall, Sweden, Haus der Kunst, Munich, M HKA Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp, Belgium, Fridman Gallery, New York and the Neue Galerie Graz, Austria.
In 2018, the animated film "Mark Tulip, who spoke with flowers" received the Special Jury Prize at the Odesa International Film Festival and the Grand Prix of the KROK festival. In 2020 the film "Letter to a Turtledove" was included in the "War and Cinema" programme of the American magazine e-flux; in 2022 it was shown in the MoMA screening programme "Notes from the Ground".