Andréa Stanislav

Andréa Stanislav

Заграница (Over the Border)

2022

Organza fabric, latex mask, turntable, sound, video, 90 ft x 40 ft x 12 ft (dimensions vary)

Sound design by Fedor Begemot Lavrov with remixed music by Mart Niineste/Tabloited and Mariana Lants, Maria Strazhnikova, and Kaya Gordeeva

Заграница (Over the Border) is a multi-media installation reflected through a personal lens on the shattering transformations on a global and personal scale that occurred from 2019 - 2022. Stanislav’s two visits to Estonia set the stage and bookend this time frame regarding a world before and after.

The installation begins with a labyrinthian space made from suspended lengths of sheer fabric forms transitioning from white to black with a rotating figurative sculpture within, whose character appears in the video. The fabric forms reference the location’s past as the Kreenholmi Textile Factory. The video’s locations include the Soviet-era theater space within the residency Kreenholmi mansion. The artist collected accounts of love, loss, and waiting from a group of 90-year-old best female friends in Kohtia-Nõmme (Taimi Vist, Laine, and Ellen Pärn, and dancers Ia Kukk and Urve Kilk). Stanislav also interviewed refugees in Narva, including several young women — (Alona Olegovna and Alisa Prodazha) drawing parallels between their existence with the group of 90-year-olds. The third subject is the artist herself reflecting on the death of her husband who passed away while filming the project in May 2022, bringing her 2019 premonition full circle to fruition.

Stanislav’s work is anchored in reconstructed collected memories, lensed through the collision of beauty and horror -- dualities that aim to intimate sublimity. She realizes images, multimedia installations, sculptures that fracture and transform through abstract and referential actions, and collaged elements. This work also mines the past, present, and future, via metaphysical narratives and structures — while questioning unresolved 20th-century histories in the present, including failures of imperial power structures. She utilizes tropes of Cosmisim, Science Fiction, and the paranormal to question and project the future, while also challenging utopian and dystopian harmonies and destruction. Her installations mine concepts of manifest destiny through space exploration — questioning systems built on human capital, and the will to remain human. Stanislav’s installations erode the boundary between subject and object in a literal "physicality of ideas" — manifested experientially through an immersive experience.

Special thanks:

NART, EKA, Johanna Rannula, Mart Niineste, Fedor Begemot Lavrov, Mrs. Rannula, Julius, Taimi Vist, Laine, Ellen Pärn, Ia Kukk, Urve Kilk, Alona Olegovna, Alisa Prodazha, and the IUPAH Travel Grant, Indiana University - Bloomington.