New York, February 27 – March 31, 2001
Artists: Rudi Molacek and Maria Serebriakova
Based on their experiences during a four-week journey through Mexico in the spring of 2000, Maria Serebriakova and Rudi Molacek produced a multi-channel video installation titled When The Winter Gets Too Long. They present videos such as Don Carlos cherishing the memory of Mexican author Castañeda by traveling through the Sierra Tarahumara in the search of the drug “peyote”. Another video features the performance of a Mexican, dressed in folklore and dancing a traditional polka in a hotel lobby in Oaxaca. A third video, Pig in Paradise, follows a pig gathering food at an exotic beach. And finally, both artists invite viewers to a road movie shot with two parallel cameras during their extensive trip through Mexico. Serebriakova and Molacek applied a very relaxed formal technique when filming these videos. They prefer to stress the lightness and easiness of their romantic journey. The spectator will not find any pathos in these moving images. The search for a forbidden drug lacks any moralizing posture, the folklore dancer is not representing a symbol of lost identity and the dirty pig on a polluted beach cannot be reframed into a finger-pointing analysis of the social, political and economic conditions of an emerging market.
