Anna Kryvenko – Grand Illusion

A fictional film lecture on the search for the geographical midpoint of Europe

During her fictional film lecture – The Great Illusion, Anna Kryvenko will introduce us to her research on the search for the geographical midpoint of Europe. A detective and an ironic story about rediscovered archive footage from the 1990s, which was filmed in Slovakia, will give us a new, all-changing perspective on the history of Central Europe from the fall of the Berlin Wall to today.

The geographical centre of Europe is a hypothetical point that depends on the definition of specific boundaries. It is mainly determined by the methods used to calculate it and whether the extremes of Europe include, for example, outlying islands. We will look at the search for this mythical point as an attempt to understand the colonial way of looking at the world.

The dispute over where the centre of Europe is located arises because of the conventionality and ambiguity of the borders of this part of the world, especially in the south and east. The centre of Europe can be found in countries that are mostly on the periphery of geopolitical life, such as – Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, but also Slovakia.

Anna Kryvenko is a visual artist and film director from Ukraine, who is a graduate of the Center for Audiovisual Studies at the Faculty of Film and Television at FAMU in Prague. Anna’s artistic practice moves in the border zone between hybrid cinematography and contemporary art intended to be exhibited in a gallery. All her works are related to topics such as home, Ukraine, war or revolutions in cyberspace. All of this is connected by one view of the world through memory, whether historical or personal.

This residency is supported by the Creative Europe programme. The residency program is supported using public funding by Slovak Arts Council.

The residency is organized in collaboration with Meet Factory in the Czech Republic, hablarenarte: in Spain and Visual Culture Research Center, in Ukraine.