Anton Vidokle (1965, Moscow) is an artist, film director, lecturer and editor of the E-flux art journal. He was born in Moscow and lives in New York and Berlin. He started studying painting in the Soviet Union, immigrated to the United States with his parents in 1981 and continued his studies at the School of Visual Art in New York. Vidokle has initiated or co-initiated many acclaimed international projects, such as Unitednationsplaza, a temporary art school. In 2008, Vidokle and Julieta Aranda created the Time/Bank platform for the artistic community, where artists, curators, writers and other people working in the arts can help each other get things done without the use of money, by exchanging their time and skills. He has also made many critically acclaimed films.
Gilgamesh: She Who Saw The Deep
Video installation, 2021
The Epic of Gilgamesh is the oldest literary work discovered to date. Composed in Mesopotamia more than five thousand years ago, it describes the journey of Gilgamesh, the ruler of one of the first historical metropolises: Uruk. Following the death of Enkidu, his best and closest friend, Gilgamesh embarks on a quest to find immortality, to avoid meeting the same fate. Part god and part human, Gilgamesh encounters a varied cast of characters, ranging from the goddess Ishtar and the scorpion people to Utnapishtim, who, like Noah, saved humanity from the Great Flood by building an ark. Filmed on the banks of the Tigris River, near the ancient cities of Mardin, Hasankeyf, and Dara, the film takes us on a journey through time and space. Accompanied by an original score by Alva Noto, Gilgamesh is a meditation on questions of living, death, friendship, love, and immortality.
The film is primarily in the Kurdish language (Kurmanji), which is spoken by many millions of Kurdish people living in south-eastern Turkey. Following the military coup in 1980, this language was officially prohibited in public and private life. The film features an all-female cast of actors from the Amed Theater in Diyarbakır.
In collaboration with Pelin Tan. The research of banned languages was done in collaboration with Olga Olina.
Olga Olina (1992, Uzhhorod, Ukraine) polyglot, historical linguist, and advocate of
indigenous and minority languages. She is enchanted by faded manuscripts and absorbed by language puzzles. Fascinated by linguistic diversity, she collects languages and writing systems in her Idiomarium. Olga teaches Sanskrit as well as other ancient Indo-European languages, and researches texts in Old Lithuanian at the Humboldt University of Berlin. Presently, Olga is mastering her 10th modern and 10th ancient language.