Masha Godovannaya (born 1976, Moscow, USSR/Russia) is an experimental filmmaker, queer-feminist researcher, curator, and educator.
Masha Godovannaya (born 1976, Moscow, USSR/Russia) is an experimental filmmaker, queer-feminist researcher, curator, and educator. Approaching art production as artistic research and collective action, Masha’s artistic and scholarly practices draw on combinations of approaches and spheres such as moving image theory, experimental cinema, and DIY video tradition, social science, post-soviet/postsocialists studies, queer theory, and decolonial methodologies.
Masha holds an MFA degree in Film/Video from Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Bard College, USA, an MA degree in Sociology from European University in St. Petersburg, Russia, and a PhD in Practice at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Austria.
Masha’s films and visual works have been shown at festivals and art venues such as the International Film Festival Rotterdam, International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, BFI London Film Festival, Ann Arbor International Film Festival, European Media Art Festival, Vienna Shorts Film Festival, Engauge Experimental Film Festival, Experiments in Cinema, Manifesta 10, 7th Liverpool Biennial, Tate Modern, Centre Georges Pompidou, The Ludwig Museum at the Russian Museum, and others.
Masha’s works are distributed by Light Cone (Paris), The Collectif Jeune Cinéma (Paris), Filmmakers’ Cooperative (New York), and The CYLAND Video Archive (New York). These works are included in the collections of The State Russian Museum (St. Petersburg), and Österreichisches Filmmuseum (Vienna).
The city bridges are open again
Video / 10:00 min / 2020
02:00 min excerpt
The film is conceived as an experimental short found-footage film based on and constructed from several films by Russian avant-garde filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein. Through montage of shots from films, calls, and proclamations of original intertitles, and a specially designed soundtrack by the composer Federico Schmucler, the film concocts a visual story of a utopic revolution-about-to-happen, evoking ghosts, deities, and spirits of the past revolts and inviting them to join the struggle.
Music by Federico Schmucler
Countryless and Queer
16mm & Video / 77:00 min / 2020
Trailer
The feature-length experimental documentary “Countryless and Queer ” captures traces of queer existence and intimate arrangements lived by non-privileged queers who navigate their experiences of migration in the city of Vienna. The film unfolds narratives of five queer migrants from contexts outside of the Global North which have been marked by gender violence, homophobia, economic instability, and social misbalance. Beyond narratives of damage, marginality is lived through and treated in the film as a space for emancipation and resistance – full of humor and joy, dignity and erotic, emancipation and struggle.
Objects In Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear
Video / 61:00 min / 2007
08:00 min excerpt
This film is a personal dedication to New York, “a city symphony” to the place which means so much to me.
Music by Philip Corner, Robert Ashley, John Field, Ludwig Van Beethoven
who said there will be a walk in time
Video / 42:00 min / 2018
07:00 min excerpt
The creative documentary “who said there would be a walk in time” is a visual study conducted in collaboration with “queerANarchive” and together with the local queer community of Split, Croatia, in April 2018.
Taking kinship as a living experience of mutuality of being through which the reproduction of life and inevitability of death is negotiated, the film sketches forms and outlines the margins of queer kinships lived and practiced by the local queer community of post-socialist Split. Situating the queer kinship outside the traditional forms of a nuclear family and marriage, the interdependence of political, social, economic, and cultural contexts that affect, shape, and redefine queer kinship is revealed through a series of interviews with queer individuals and video observations of the city. Guided by intuition, emotions, and associations, the film's methodology drifts away from purely scientific approaches and conceptualization. The film is imagined and concocted using and combining freely narratives, facts, traces, wishes, dreams, and queer ephemera.
She. The Title of Artist
Video / 07:00 min / 2015
Documentation
“She. The Title of Artist" is a feminist art-based research conducted by Masha Godovannaya, Yaroslav Volovod, and Yana Mikhalina in 2015.
Grounded in feminist theory, sociology of art, visual sociology, art history, and art-based and curatorial research, the interdisciplinary project explores the “female history” in the archives and art collections of the Ilya Repin St. Petersburg Institute for Painting, Sculpture and Architecture (known as the Imperial Academy of Arts and the Ilya Repin Leningrad Institute for Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, among many other titles).
“She. Title of Artist” explores the role and the status of women in two institutions: the Repin Institute, one of the largest art educational projects in Russia, and the Museum of the Academy of Fine Arts, located in the Institute's building and dedicated to the educational, research, artistic and conservation purposes.
The research results are presented as audio- and video-installations displayed in several museum rooms and a special exhibition dedicated to female artists and students who studied in the Academy/the Institute.
Passive/Aggressive
16 mm & Video / 03:00 min / 2018
Experimental cinema and its filmmakers have had a long history of creating visual portraits of their friends, collaborators, lovers, comrades-in-arms, families, etc. There have been always two active planes in these portraits: a camera with a filmmaker behind it and (a) person(s) in front of the camera. Between them – the space, where an intimate trustful interaction is evolving and taking an audio-visual shape. “Here and now” for the participants shooting the film, “there and then” for audiences watching it after. The moments of relatedness, captured and transmitted in time and space, become reminiscences of people’s lives and feelings towards each other, an affect recorded on celluloid.
“Passive/Aggressive” is a rhizomatic audio-visual portrait of queer friends who are living a life challenging the heteronormative assumptions, in an attempt to reverse mechanisms of power relations and to negotiate the base of relatedness. Our extended union is reassembled in the fictionalised space of the film celebrating our wildness and queerness.
Music by KRUPA