Miss UIS

MISS UIS is a two-channel video installation which employs materials that are related but in radical contrast with one another to speak, essentially, of the banality of evil that defines our present quite as much as it did the period in which Hannah Arendt wrote. It is the origin of the materials that relates them: in both cases, it is the penitentiary system of the Russian Federation. Their contrasting nature also translates into the dramatic contrast between the two parts of the installation: images of a contest for the system’s personnel and testimonies of Ukrainian women who have lived through its prisons – prisoners of war and civilians kidnapped in Ukrainian territories occupied by the Russian army. The images, edited in a manner similar to a music video; the testimonies, reduced to the voices and the transcriptions. The contrast is strident and yet, the two worlds coexist.