An Evening with Chto Delat

An Evening with Chto Delat

MoMA presents the US premiere of Palace Square 100 Years After. Four Seasons of Zombie (2017), a film-lecture by the Russian collective Chto Delat ("What is to be done?"). Chto Delat was founded in 2003 in Saint Petersburg as a group of artists, critics, philosophers, and writers with the goal of merging art, political theory, and activism across media including film, graphics, theater, newspapers, radio plays, and theory. Palace Square 100 Years After deals with the centenary of the October Revolution of 1917 and its continuing repercussions. The film's narrator (Oxana Timofeeva) strolls through Saint Petersburg's Palace Square, encountering different events that trigger her imagination. If 100 years ago the driving force of the Revolution was the proletariat, today it's difficult to locate such a transformative agent; the film proposes the metaphor of the “zombie”—a mass media symbol that desperately represents the repressed power of the excluded. Following the film-lecture, artist Dmitry Vilensky, a member of Chto Delat, will be joined for a conversation by Ana Janevski, Associate Curator, Department of Media and Performance Art.