The Ukrainian art scene in the 1990s developed most quickly in the cities Kiev, Kharkov, and Odessa. If, at the beginning of the decade, the first two had the initiative, by its end critics noted an artistic boom in Odessa connected with the activities of two art institutions: the Tirs Contemporary Art Center and the New Art Association, of which Alexander Roitburd became the head. Roitburd can rightly be called the fulcrum of Ukrainian artistic life in that period.

Working with various technologies and genres, he tried to sidestep attributing his art to any particular movement. He wisely noted that “postmodern is a temporal diagnosis,” and therefore calling him a classic artist is as absurd as being, for instance, a “classic of the late-feudal era.”

Roitburd’s The Battleship Potemkin’s Psychedelic Invasion of Sergei Eisenstein’s Tautological Hallucinosis was selected by the legendary Harald Szeemann for the Plateau of Mankind main project at the 49th Venice Biennale. But it is notable not only for this reason. It is based on the epic Battleship Potemkin (1925) by Sergei Eisenstein who, with his film about the 1905 Revolution, fomented a revolution in the movie industry of his era.

For Roitburd it was noteworthy that the famous director filmed part of the movie in Odessa and featured certain urban characters based on real people (the legless man on the stairs is the shoe shiner Uncle Vanya, famous throughout Odessa). Roitburd recut several fragments relating to his native city into a multilayered surrealist tale. Over the course of the film, shots from Battleship repeat and are often mixed with dramatizations filmed by Roitburd together with a group of artists from the Odessa scene of the 1990s. In this way, he brings together the past and present, the classic and the contemporary, creating an enormous, suggestive artwork.

Oleksandr Rojtburd (Alexander Roitburd)
The Battleship Potemkin's Psychedelic Invasion of Sergei Eisenstein's Tautological Hallucinosis, 1998
b/w video, 54’ 14’’
© Moderna galerija, Ljubljana