You are kindly invited to a screening of Songs of Hope and Despair by the art collective Chto Delat International, which will take place on Friday, 2 October 2026, at 6 p.m. in the seminar room of the Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova (+MSUM).
The film, which premiered at this year’s International Film Festival Rotterdam, will be introduced by its author and the collective’s co-founder, Dmitry Vilensky. The screening will be followed by a brief conversation with Vilensky and director Olga Egorova.
The collective Chto Delat (What is to be done?) was founded in early 2003 in Petersburg by a international workgroup of artists, critics, philosophers, and writers from St. Petersburg, Moscow, Nizhny Novgorod and Berlin with the goal of merging political theory, art, and activism. Since forced emigration of the most of members of the collective due to political prosecution in Russia for its anti-war position in 2022 the collective continues its activity as Chto Delat International and build community in exile and cultivate new forms of collective practice based on open protocol participation.
Moderna galerija already holds one work by the collective in its collection: the video The Excluded. In a Moment of Danger was jointly acquired for the Arteast 2000+ collection in 2017 by Moderna galerija (Ljubljana, Slovenia) and the Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven, the Netherlands). It was the first joint acquisition within L’Internationale, a European confederation of museums, arts organizations and universities.
One of the main genres in which the group works is the social musical, the "songspiel" in Brechtian terminology, where the actors play out the most critical political issues of the day. As a rule the main narrative in the work is a specific historical event, which the artists subject to analysis and interpretation; they propose that viewers take a new view of recent history.
Songs of Hope and Despair (80 min) unfolds as a collective journey through history, myth, and lived experience. Performed by a diverse community of migrants from Russia and their friends, the film stages an encounter between fairy-tale figures, folk memory, and the unfinished struggles of social emancipation. Its protagonists — the Bundschuh, the Fish, the Foxtail, the Rainbow, the Dead Drummer, Muse-Leaving-Germany, and others — inhabit a world of absurd quests, manipulated by a trickster-magician (played by Manuel Muerte) and accompanied by the haunting voices of Wilder ChorYander.
For their highly experimental roadmovie, the Russian exiles took inspiration from two significant historical artworks: the former East German painter Werner Tübke’s The Panorama of the Peasants’ War and Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s film The Niklashausen Journey. Staged in April 2025 in the former mining town of Hettstedt in the Saxony-Anhalt, this film is conceived as an improvised fairy tale that reflects on failed revolutions, ecology and the anxieties of our current days. It’s a magical game and absurdist musical in one, in which a group of strangely costumed heroes set out on a journey to find a miracle. Raising the question: what does a miracle even look like in politically dire times like these?
The event takes place in frames of the Kamor Residency Programme, organized by the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMSU), Rijeka.
