Jasna Hribernik & Zmago Lenárdič

1959, Maribor; 1959, Ljubljana Yugoslavia; live in Ljubljana / Slovenia

NewMoscowYork, 2004

video, 35'

Courtesy of the artists

It seemed that the West-East division of the world could really exist only in its dependency on the comparison of quantity relations, while an additional condition for

maintaining the phantasm was that these relations should never become practically

comparable. In the event that they became comparable, the phantasm was destroyed. And further: when Eastern dissidents were allowed to emigrate West, the “freedom” of Western intellectuals was questioned, when the yearly 1st May parades were no longer broadcast on television, the Western military alliance lost its identity and legitimacy of existence, when the consumer society reached the East, the West suddenly considered itself poorer, when the famous Stalker’s “Zones” disappeared from everyday life, Moscow suddenly became thirty percent larger than New York. When the relations of equal quantities become practically comparable it seems that everything becomes the same…newmoscowyork… In the video the artists used footage they filmed in 1999 and 2002 in New York and in 2004 in Moscow.