In his Gameland project, multimedia artist Denis Davydov studies a transition period in the history of his two native countries, Uzbekistan and Russia, that had previously constituted a single state – the USSR. The artist tries to take a look from today’s reality back at the 1990s through the eyes of the child that he was at that instable time. The depiction of the events of that decade from the standpoint of a teenager who was just entering puberty gives these works the special spellbinding aesthetics of children’s hopes and dreams of a new and bigger world. Davydov’s paradigm greatly differs from the usual approach to the nineties. His gaze is totally devoid of the “film noir” elements prevalent in post-Soviet movies and documentaries of the eighties and nineties: just as a child who is not able to think critically due to his lack of experience, the artist’s thinking tends towards the “magical.”

The interview is scrubbed, and MC Zhorik enters the scene. The track of the children’s hip-hop star of the 1990s seems to announce the end of the Soviet Union and the beginning of a new era. The resulting mix recreates the mood of a generation – an unprecedented combination of indifference, anxiety and the desire to understand what’s going so as to make plans for the future.

The simultaneously lyrical and disturbing impression created by the work is augmented by the soundtrack composed by the multimedia artist Farhad Farzali. From the very first seconds, we hear the crackling sound of a flame recreated with the help of a vinyl record – a symbol of Soviet domestic life and a technology used by children at the time to listen to fairy tales. It is followed by a fragment of an interview with the young virtuoso pianist Evgeny Kissin, who muses on philosophical themes with a sadness uncharacteristic for a child.

Internal Memory Simulation Sequence, 2022
Computer graphics,
resolution: 3840*2160, duration: 4’33”
Courtesy of the Artist

Internal Memory Simulation Sequence

Project team

Visualisation and Animation: Eugeniy Padalkin
Research and Coordination: Amalia Tumasova
Art Consulting: Andrey Misiano