2025 | Documentary | 28 min | Russia

Director: Vladimir Sumashedov
Producers: Olga Michi, Maxim Koveshnikov, Svetlana Ignatenko

ABOUT THE FILM

The film ‘Cherkashins. Performance of perestroika ’ tells about the work of a pair of world-famous performance artists. In the centre of attention: a series of performances by Valera and Natasha Cherkashin, which they held in the early 1990s at the Moscow metro station ‘Ploshchad Revolutsii’. The background and the main material for the artists’ work was a unique historical context: the country in which they were born and grew up was rapidly receding into the past, and with it went the symbols, heroes and visual system of an entire era. On the wave of these changes, new meanings and new art are born.

How does the perception of information and image change at the breakdown of eras? How do artists respond to these changes in their work? And why does performance become the main means of expression in the 90s?