Sergej Bugajew Afrika Stalker 3

Sergei Bugaev Afrika's Stalker 3 was first shown in June 2001 at the Valencia Biennial in Spain. Then titled "My Movie," the video was part of a one-room installation by the artist. Some of the original Valencia installation and a new series of mixed media works will be shown in three rooms at I-20 during Bugaev's third exhibition at the gallery.

The Russian director Andre Tarkovsky noted that "the ideal cinema is a newsreel." Bugaev's video is named after Tarkovsky's 1979 science fiction film "Stalker" (or the second version, since it was said that the director destroyed the original print of the film). Based on a science fiction story, "Picnic on the Margin," the stalker in Tarkovsky's film is a madman and saint who trespasses into an anomalous zone, a place where extraterrestrials visit the earth, and danger lies in wait.

In 1990, Bugaev's exhibition "Donaldestruction" marked the first time that works by a contemporary artist were shown in the Lenin Museum - a few years before the museum itself ceased to exist. Since then, in installations like Krimania (1995) and MIR: Made in the XX Century (1999-2000), Bugaev has reused the discarded symbols and artifacts of the former USSR and its obsolete ideology. The video in Stalker 3, a found object from a conflict in the new Russia, is a continuation of this work.

Oleysa Turkina, a curator at the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg, writes that Bugaev's flags, statues and psychiatric hospital uniforms "literally substantiates the dramatic quality of the dislocation that has occurred...he works in the dwindling danger of the sovereign zone which divides one epoch from another, where the previous order has already been demolished, and the principle of symbolic expenditure comes to take the place of ideals of productivity and work. The extreme expression of this principle is war, based on sacrifice and permitted killing."

Stalker 3 is found footage, edited by the artist, who has also reworked the sound in collaboration with artist Dmitry Gelfand. The video, which was found by Russian special forces, captures one day - April 16, 1996 - of the war in Chechnya. It shows the fate of the Russian 245th Motorized Infantry Regiment, comprised primarily of new, untrained recruits, who were returning home without helicopter or aerial support two weeks into a general ceasefire. Beginning in the early afternoon, the armored column was ambushed and wiped out by Arab fighters led by a Saudi Arabian national.

The 53-minute video includes footage of the morning after the fight and a funeral for Chechnyan fighters in the winter of 1995-96, which was a propaganda postscript to the original tape. Bugaev has also installed 34 enamel plates with stills from the video. They first appear as abstract shapes that take form before disappearing again.

Stalker 3 is projected in a white environment, and is accompanied by white rabbit skins stained with black oil. It allows for immersion in the experience and abstraction of it. The reality of war is partly eroded by the amateur quality of the video and the editing by the artist. The approaching armored column and the sounds of birds; the first explosions and shouts of the attackers; the falling of the cameraman, and the raising of the camera by somebody else; the eroded picture, alternating between color and black-and-white; the triumphant Saudi commander on the morning after walking past destroyed Russian tanks; the plaintive song at the Chechnyan funeral - all these factors play more than one role in Bugaev's work.

Sergei Bugaev Afrika represented the Russian Federation Pavilion at the 48th Venice Biennale. He had his first comprehensive survey exhibition in Europe in 1995 at the MAK-Austrian Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna. His shows include the Stedelijk Museum of Modern Art, Amsterdam; the Pori Art Museum, Finland; the State Russian Museum; the Power Plant., Toronto; the Clocktower Gallery, PS1 Contemporary Art Center; the Queens Museum of Art, New York; the Fisher Gallery, University of Southern California; and the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio.

Bugaev was born in Novorossisk, on the Black Sea, in 1966. He lives and works in St. Petersburg, Russia.

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Sergej Bugajew Afrika "Stalker 3"