The Buried Alive Videos compiles six works supposedly produced by The Buried Alive Group between , and brackets them with sections from The Buried Alive Manifesto , which sets the creative and ideological guidelines of the group.
From the East runs in six episodes released every Monday from January 10 through February 20, , streaming a new film each week accompanied by a commissioned response published in text form. In the dusk of the Rashomon effect and the dawn of gaslighting, there stood a third category of narration: that of simulation and fiction, of counter-speculation infiltrating established historical narratives. The compilation of videos presented here was made by the young artist Efim Poplavsky, also known as Maxim Komar-Myshkin, and The Buried Alive Group, his collective of friendsβall immigrants from the former Soviet Union.
Komar-Myshkin was born in Moscow in and committed suicide in Tel Aviv in Everything is senseless chaos. Yet this senseless chaos is the hotbed for evil intentions and conspirations. Paranoia is justified. According to The Buried Alive group, absurd chaos can only have a conspiratorial meaning. If Soviet state censorship forced artists and writers at the time to formulate double meanings in their work in order to to evade government restrictions, art critic Gleb Napreenko explains the modus operandi of Russian artists of the first decade of the millennium as one that operates in opposition to that of the Soviet era:.
But they do not open any of the lost territories within power that are forgotten by power itself, nor do they reveal any hidden layers of the unconscious, as the subversive affirmations of artists from socialist countries often did. The difference between the approach of Sots Art or Collective Actions to all things Soviet, and the approach of contemporary artists to Putinism, reads as the difference between the study of a rhetoric hollowed out and robbed of truth, and a rhetoric that consists of lies to begin with.
Between and , Komar-Myshkin and his friends produced a series of short videos compiled in The Buried Alive Videos , along with excerpts from the manifesto that outlines their wilfully resigned approach, homemade aesthetics, and obsolete means.
