A retrospective of films by Masha Godovannaya, united by the themes of cities, dreams, and ghosts.
For artist and researcher Masha Godovannaya, processuality is central to her cinematic practice, which is why this program features works created across different periods—from early 2000s film experiments to recent digital videos. A retrospective makes it possible to trace recurring motifs that flow from one picture to another, shifting and transforming along the way.
One such leitmotif is the city. St. Petersburg, New York, and Vienna—between which Godovannaya’s creative and personal biography developed—become active participants rather than merely a backdrop in her films. They are not imprints of reality: these works are far from mimetic. The boundaries of the documentary genre are constantly being unsettled, through sound, as in There Is Still More to Come, or through editing, as in the collective project Flatness Surface Mutation Shift: I Hand Out Flesh to You, You Will Manage It, where a new space is constructed from fragments of familiar places. In Godovannaya’s films (Magic Ferry, UNTITLED #1, Text Floating On a River), the effect is achieved through interventions into the material essence of the image.
Alongside recognizable locations, Godovannaya’s films feature indeterminate spaces—a forest edge, sparse woodland, a shoreline. In the musical film Wind they take on a dreamlike quality, while in Debris of Dreams they emerge through the stitching together of fragments of memory and imagery. This is not a contrast to the urban environment, but its continuation: both types of spaces are filled with the ghosts of the past and of unrealized futures.
In her* hands and his shape, Godovannaya, together with Sílvia das Fadas, not only speaks directly about ghostliness but also turns to found footage, emphasizing the spectral structure of cinema as such. It records real people and events that instantly become incorporeal images, captured on film bearing visible traces of time—scratches, dust or fading. The vulnerability of the medium is especially evident in her early work The First Round Dance, in which the artist—through the same kind of vulnerability—marks the points of contact between herself and her materials and tools (as she often films about herself and women’s experience).
Whereas physical interaction with film stock leaves the touch of hands on the image, the transition to digital technology maintains the touch of the gaze no less significant for Godovannaya. She turns the camera toward people close to her, inviting them to become co-authors, as in Recovering Links, which will be screened in Russia for the first time. The key elements of her cinema—handcrafted quality and collectivity—become especially palpable upon a careful viewing of the films in the retrospective.
The screening will be followed by a Q& A with the artist Masha Godovannaya.
The event is organized as part of Masha Godovannaya’s Garage Field Research project Evgeny Yufit: Hauntology of the Archive and the program Garage Screen.
The First Round Dance
An observation of children playing in a street in Brooklyn, a moment of spontaneity and engagement captured on a 16mm camera. The filmed material was hand-colored using iodine and brilliant green.
Masha Godovannaya, 2001. 3 min.
Magic Ferry
A trip on the Staten Island Ferry between New York City boroughs, shot frame by frame on black-and-white film and later hand-colored. The condensation of time creates a sense of transition and an unusual perception of a familiar route.
Masha Godovannaya, 2001. 30 sec.
UNTITLED #1
A girl dancing on Nevsky Prospekt, accidentally captured on Super 8 film, her movements and gestures intensified through rhythmic montage and music by Gianluca Porcu (aka Lu), highlighting the tension between the fleeting (the body) and the eternal (the city).
Masha Godovannaya, 2005. 4 min.
her* hands and his shape
Created in collaboration with Sílvia das Fadas, this work places images from the past into a new context. The incantatory question “Do you believe in ghosts?” resounds as a refrain over a two-channel projection of landscapes and objects combined with footage from pieces by other women directors, re-filmed through the optics of a 16mm Krasnogorsk-3 and a 16mm Bolex camera.
Masha Godovannaya, Sílvia das Fadas, 2017. 14 min.
Debris of Dreams
A video exploration of invisible yet intensely experienced events—dreams, intertwined with a maternal fear of loss and separation from a child.
Masha Godovannaya, 2018. 7 min 30 sec.
Wind
This piece is a multi-screen music video created for the artist’s friends, the band Sintipon, featuring footage shot on 16mm film in forests, fields, and by the water.
Masha Godovannaya, 2019. 5 min 30 sec.
Flatness Surface Mutation Shift: I Hand Out Flesh to You, You Will Manage It
A collective work composed of heterogeneous fragments, this picture becomes a space of interaction, of assembling bodies and images under conditions of distance and self-isolation. Guides in this new space include the dog Zhuzha, film cameras, and touch.
Masha Godovannaya and a collective of authors, 2020. 23 min.
Recovering Links
Co-created with Denise Palmieri, Recovering Links captures the authors’ conversations during a walk through Vienna’s 15th district—a shared movement in which personal stories and memories of the place intertwine.
Masha Godovannaya, 2020. 23 min.
Text Floating On A River
A collaboration with the poet and art historian Koivo, this work is an exploration of Vienna with a 16mm camera alternately loaded with black-and-white and expired color film. Koivo’s poem accompanies the search for architectural traces of past eras in the bridges, overpasses, and underpasses of the contemporary city.
Masha Godovannaya, 2021. 9 min.
There Is Still More To Come
A cinematic walk through Saint Petersburg, where empty streets, details of the urban landscape, and visual distortions create an atmosphere of anxious anticipation. The soundtrack, composed of city noises and music by Enrique Arriaga, turns it into an act of observation and testimony, as the camera’s gaze records the hidden tension of time.
Masha Godovannaya, 2024. 14 min.
