Nostos

At the center of Katya Muromtseva’s first solo exhibition in Paris is Death Certificate, a new animated film in which a woman named K. returns to her country of origin after a decade abroad only to find that, legally, she no longer exists. The film offers a contemporary take on Homer’s The Odyssey and the theme of nostos. Here, however, the returning hero is not Odysseus but K., who must embark on a surreal bureaucratic journey to collect the documents that will allow her to exchange her death certificate for a birth certificate. Only after she becomes legible to bureaucracy can her personhood and jus soli to be recognized.

 

Through K.’s predicament, Muromtseva reveals the paradox of being a stranger: it is to experience invisibility and hypervisibility at the same time. A stranger’s presence registers quickly as difference. Their appearance, way of speaking, habits and beliefs mark them as alien and impossible to pass by unnoticed. Yet, the experience of being a stranger also forecloses the possibility of being understood as a full person. A stranger will come into view as a bizarre, exotic, or frightening object, but never as an individual with their own history, interior life, and claims on the world. Like K. before bureaucracy, the stranger is always already exposed and obscured.

 

To create a work that allows this uneasy condition to be explored, Muromtseva draws on the literary tradition of magical realism, where the miraculous becomes mundane, and the mundane, miraculous. Speaking birds go unquestioned while a standard-issue voucher becomes a time limit on a person’ s life; elements from drawings by Goya and Rembrandt are visually quoted alongside Diane Arbus. The “magic” of the plot is not in service of whimsy but rather exposing the illogic of bureaucratic procedures. The Department of Faces, for instance, sounds like fabulation until you remember that identifying anonymized faces is a function of war today, that families arrive in morgues years later to locate the remains of loved ones based on photographs alone. As an ongoing component of her practice, Muromtseva also bases many of the features of Death Certificate on interviews she conducted with individuals who have experienced dislocation, as well as her own immigration experience. By creating a world that is strangely familiar, she challenges viewers to confront the absurd inhumanity of procedures that society has long accepted as normal.

 

Muromtseva understood that to communicate such a condition, she also had to forge a new medium. She created a technique of filming shadow puppets against illuminated, rotating plastic cylinders on which she hand-draws the film’s scenes. Over a two-year process, she made 44 transparencies and hundreds of drawings. This is remarkable not only for the sheer formal precision it required, but also for the theory she embeds in it.  A shadow is the most visible trace a body can leave; it is an undeniable index of presence. However, it is also a form that withholds: a shadow is a blank surface, without interiority. To be rendered as shadow is to be maximally exposed and minimally known. It is, in other words, the condition of the stranger as image.

The shadow puppets also evoke Plato’s allegory of the cave, which remains a touchstone in media theory because it questions our ability to parse “mere” projection from reality. In Plato’s account, “gullible” prisoners chained in a cave mistake the shadows flickering on the wall for reality, having known nothing else. Enlightenment requires being dragged into the sunlight by philosopher kings who already possess the truth.

 

Muromtseva invokes aspects of Plato’s tale, but does so critically rather than reverentially. Unlike popular immersive technologies, “Nostos” absorbs us in K.’s plight while remaining permeable to our own. The rotating cylinders in the gallery space cast shadows from Muromtseva’s animation backgrounds across the walls. Moving through the installation we gain insight into the artist’s process, making the exhibition more about collective reflection than isolated user experience.

 

Although K. is forced to endure a decade abroad in The Land of Bright Light , she does not gain knowledge. Exposed to unrelenting light, K. instead labors over grains of sand stuck in birdfeathers. She must learn the language of the birds in order to clean them, and in turn, loses her past, her memories, and her sense of time. At the film’s close, K. obtains the required paperwork but is denied a birth certificate due to a tragic truth: she has metamorphosed into brightness. Years in a country of “enlightenment” have wrought alienation rather than belonging.

 

Because K. cannot be reborn, she must return her face and dissolve into light. Is this K.’s failure to perform for bureaucracy or perhaps her refusal to conform? K. has become someone else and Muromtseva finds a way for her, finally, to be what she has become. Slipshaping into brightness, K. is freed from the demand to be legible at all. Rather than the trope of homecoming, Death Certificate offers something else to the stranger in each of us: that to be released from a world that cannot see you is, in the end, its own form of arrival.