Sasha Litvintseva & Beny Wagner interdisciplinary practice centered on questions about the thresholds between the body and its surroundings, knowledge regimes and power, modes of organizing and perceiving the natural world.
Sasha Litvintseva and Beny Wagner are artists, filmmakers, researchers and writers. They’ve been working collaboratively in moving image, text, and lectures since 2017. Focussing on moving image as a tool for the active production of new worlds, their practice has been driven by questions about the thresholds between the body and its surroundings, knowledge regimes and power, modes of organizing and perceiving the natural world.
Their combined and individual work has been presented globally: Berlinale, Rotterdam, Courtisane, Cinema Du Reel, RIDM, Ann Arbor, Alchemy and Guanajuato film festivals, Eye Film Museum, HKW Berlin, ICA London, CAC Vilnius, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Berlinische Galerie, MUMOK Vienna, Sonic Acts, Impakt Festival, Berlin Atonal and the Videobrasil, Moscow Young Art, Wroclaw Media Art, Venice Art and Venice Architecture biennales.
Beny Wagner is currently a PhD candidate at the Archaeologies of Media and Technology Research Group at Winchester School of Art and was a researcher at Jan van Eyck Academy in 2015-6. He has been a senior lecturer at Gerrit Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam since 2017.
Sasha Litvintseva is a lecturer in Film Theory and Practice at Queen Mary University of London and holds a PhD in Media, Communications and Cultural Studies from Goldsmiths. She is currently working on a book monograph.
A Demonstration
HD Video / 24:00 min / 2020
‘A Demonstration’ is a monster film with no monsters. Inspired by the existence of taxonomies of monsters at the heart of early modern European science, the film explores and reinterprets a way of seeing the natural world that is almost impossible to imagine from today’s vantage point. Early Modern naturalists were guided by a logic in which truths were discovered through visual analogy. The word ‘monster’ comes from the latin ‘monstrare’, meaning to show, to reveal, to demonstrate. “A Demonstration” picks up on these themes in a poetic exploration of the boundaries of sight and the metamorphosis of form.
Story / camera / edit / sound: Sasha Litvintseva and Beny Wagner
Original score: Beny Wagner
Sound mix: Rob Driessen
Color grade: Guillaume Soren
Producers: Video Power and CaSk films
Bilateria
HD Video / 13:00 min / 2019
An homage to Vilem Flusser’s text, Vampyroteuthis Infernalis, Bilateria employs the Klein Bottle as a form with which to inhabit the interstices between organisms and environments. The Klein bottle is a mathematical shape that, like the Möbius strip, merges interior and exterior, beginning and end. Here the form is simultaneously a leaky vessel and a projection surface for an array of found video material. Organisms and environments are mapped onto a single metabolic pathway where inside and outside continuously fold into each other in rhythmic pulsations.