Nikolay Karabinovych

2020

Video, 00:15:14.
Materials: Videoinstallatie, video (kleur en geluid) en metalen muziekdoos

Collection: Stad Antwerpen, in langdurige bruikleen in M HKA (Inv. no. SCA0042).

Even Further, as one may assume from the title (a certain wish + a direction) is a work on an imaginary future.  It started from the artist’s reflections about chance, discontinued lives, missed opportunities to meet and resurrection as a recovery for that missing. Could people who suffered from different catastrophes imagine that their children would meet once? Where such an encounter could take place? How would the place of their encounter sound? These questions are key to understanding this work. 

A tourist bus appears in the frame. A group of people gets out of the bus, following the guide. They listen attentively to the guide for several minutes. Her speech, just like the work itself, is charged with complex cultural and historical references. Even Further speaks in its own dialect, reflecting the toponyms, history, and spirits of places, visited by Karabinovych in his search for the perfect filming location. The artist went further and further and travelled between Odesa, Kyiv, Gent, Amsterdam, Sainte-Croix, Berlin, Zurich, Stuttgart, Istanbul, Tbilisi, Salonika, Groningen, Antwerp, Bratislava, Chernivtsi and Sadagora. Only to realise that there was no need to go far. After all that wandering, the perfect location was found: the mirage-like landscape of the salty estuary Kuyalnik, not far from his home city, Odesa. 

The soundtrack of Even Further  is a song, the origin of which is still disputed. The Greek version of this song tells about unrequited love, while the klezmer, Jewish one, is about seeing off a young man to the 1905 Russian-Japanese war. The same sequence of notes provokes completely different feelings. And what could be actually happening between people performing that tune? —the question that echoes the complex history of diasporas of Ukraine’s south, and the multicultural Odesa in particular.