Moscow, 2006, still images from 16mm video

Moscow, 2006, installation view, Temporary Art Museum Soi Sabai, Bangkok, Thailand, 2006

Moscow

2006, 16mm film transferred to SD video, 3min 50s, mute

In Moscow (2006) Mai Hofstad Gunnes has filmed the seven skyscrapers raised in Moscow during Stalin’s regime in the 1950s. Inspired by early neo-gothic architecture of Manhattan, the monumental have acquired landmark status in the cityscape of Moscow, and house a series of different functions: a university, the ministry of foreign affairs and foreign trade, two hotels, and three apartment complexes. Against the original architectonic plan, the Moscow skyscrapers were expanded with spires, in an acknowledgement of their symbolic and visual role in a city with an otherwise horizontal and communal profile. Stalin’s skyscrapers were later copied in the architecture of other communist states in the Warsaw Treaty Organization. The spires thus came to function as a specific style known as “Stalinist gothic.” Shot on 16mm film black and white film (transferred to DVD), Mai Hofstad Gunnes’ work show establishing shots and close-ups of the skyscrapers, focusing in particular on the spires, which eventually take off from their solid fundament. Through digital animation in the manner of an early trickfilm, Moscow activates the possibility for alter-native imaginative worlds within an existing authoritarian structure, a thematic already embedded in the architectural foundation of the work. 

Elisabeth Byre, Exhibition catalogue text for Ghost in the Machine, Kunstnernes Hus, 2008

Moscow
2006, 16mm film transferred to SD video, 3min 50s, mute