"The Missing (the Last March)" di Naum Medovoy

Coinciding with the Biennale Architettura 2016, the evening will feature a panel discussion and presentation by cinematographer and painter, Naum Medovoy, combines paradoxical trends of contemporary art and gallerist and curator Oksana Salamatina.

The Missing (The Last March) was broadcast by Thirteen/WNET in New York, the flagship PBS station, in 1985 as part of its acclaimed local series about World War II: Years of
Darkness. The film speaks with a rare poignancy about millions of Russian soldiers who fell into the category "missing." Many of them were captured by Germans and suffered in Nazi concentration camps; a great number of them died.

Thirty years after this broadcast, co-producer Naum Medovoy has revisited and drawn inspiration from the original film. He has created large drawings using images from the film as his starting point. A collaboration between artist Naum Medovoy and cinematographer Trevor Tweeten.

Trevor Tweeten (b. Wilmington, Delaware, 1983) is a New York-based artist and cinematographer. He holds a BA in Film and Video Art and works at the crossroads between video, sculpture and installation. As a cinematographer, he has realized a number of feature films and video art projects, ranging from narrative to documentary to experimental. His work is often noted for its strong imagery and lyrical visual style and was recently presented at the 55th Venice Biennale (2013), as part of a collaborative project with Richard Mosse for the Irish Pavilion. 

Naum Medovoy’s career spans four decades. A self-taught artist, he was mostly a documentary filmmaker until he began printing stills from his films, applying oil sticks and black and white ink to their surfaces. The resulting works serve as platforms for expressive and perceptual experimentation, which are often self-referential in nature; Medovoy’s photo-documentary collage paintings are rooted in his childhood memories and previous work. It is this strange appeal of Medovoy’s work—which straddles the line between beauty and grotesqueness—that gives it its lasting influence and afterlife, that “grips” our throat; or, as George Stevens once declared in talking about film, that bounces off the page and into the viewer’s mind, like something alive and changing. The same thing can be said about Medovoy’s art; it lasts with you long after you’ve left it.