Community Curation

For MoMI’s Community Curation initiative, a committee of ten curators and collectors nominated a shortlist of boundary-pushing artists for display on the Museum’s Herbert S. Schlosser Media Wall. These artists’ works reflect how personal and cultural histories shape artistic practice. From these nominees, the public cast their votes, selecting three international artists: Anna Malina Zemlianski, Rodell Warner, and Ceren Su Çelik. This process shifts traditional curatorial authority by inviting the public to play an active role.

Nov. 22–Dec. 26: Anna Malina Zemlianski
Dec. 27–Jan. 30: Rodell Warner
Jan. 31–March 6: Ceren Su Çelik

Part of Museum without Walls: MoMI x Tezos

Anna Malina Zemlianski (b. 1984, German/Ukrainian)
By the Rivers of Shadows and Matter, 2024 [pictured above]
Digital video
3 mins, 25 secs, loop

Anna Malina Zemlianski presents a series of three vignettes examining the multilayered relationships between cinema, history, and fragmented cultural memory. The Ukraine-born artist draws on film history, including Soviet film artifacts, to explore how overlooked remnants—on film and in life—preserve traces of lived experience. Her work reflects on the fragility of archives and the ways that images, analog and digital, shape our understanding of the past.  

The first vignette, Flow, depicts the artist’s process of working with footage atop a debris-covered desk, exploring the relationship between intention and chance, taking inspiration from Andrei Tarkovsky’s depiction of a decaying world in his 1979 film Stalker. Through the inclusion of layered, hand-painted, and manipulated imagery, Zemlianski likens the movement of water to the transient flow of images across time. In Hysterie, she presents a selection of films, including home movies, as a palimpsest of history. Through material interventions, she highlights how state-regulated fiction can capture historical turmoil, inadvertently documenting the realities of oppression. The final vignette, Memories, uses machine learning–generated sequences and paper collage to reflect on the brittleness of memory, exploring dissociation, the fleeting nature of recollection, and the tactile qualities of early cinema.

Mint your very own fragment of Anna Malina Zemlianski’s By the Rivers of Shadows and Matter through December 26.

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