The Lemberg Machine: Screening of a film by Dana Kavelina

Language accessibility: English

Free entrance

The event is part of the third day of the biennale’s opening weekend.

The film The Lemberg Machine tackles a difficult and complex subject: the Lviv Pogroms of June and July 1941 and the subsequent unfolding of the Shoah in the city. Kavelina approaches the subject through stop-motion animation, which she understands not only as a technique but also as a figure of resurrection. A fictional setting, the Ghost Machine, frames multiple voices speaking the many languages of the city. The film itself operates like the Machine, which catches subtle signals from the past and transforms them into moving pictures. The stories told in the film are based on the eyewitness accounts of survivors, the tales of Rabbi Nachman, and the Kabbalah.

Commissioned by steirischer herbst ’23.

Dana Kavelina (b. 1995 in Melitopol, based in Berlin and Lviv) works primarily with animation and video, but also installation, painting and graphics. She graduated from the Department of Graphics at the National Technical University of Ukraine. Her works often address military violence and war with regard to the position of a victim as a political subject—as well as the distance between historical and individual trauma, memory and misrepresentation. Her 2020 film Letter to a Turtledove was acquired by The Museum of Modern Art in New York and featured in the exhibition Signals: How Video Transformed the World. Her works were featured in The Kyiv Perennial in Vienna, 60th Venice Biennale, MHKA Antwerp, festival steirischer herbst 2022 and 2023 etc. She is the Main Prize winner of the 7th edition of the PinchukArtCentre Prize, shortlisted for the Future Generation Art Prize 2024.