W. Kentridge | F. Sarhan: Telegrams from the Nose

The fine artist William Kentridge and the young composer François Sarhan radically deconstruct soviet political myths in the laconic music/film performance Telegrams from the Nose (2008). Russia amidst a significant cultural and social revolution and simultaneously at the beginning of a fatal and totalitarian dictatorship under Stalin.

Telegrams from the Nose is inspired by Nikolai Gogol’s tale “The Nose” (1836), Dmitri Schostakowitsch’s opera of the same name (1928) by Daniil Kharms, a surrealist, poet and dramatist from the early soviet era who became a victim of Stalin’s crimes and also by the final words of Nikolai Bukharin, a man who equally fell victim to the terror of the dictator. For Sarhan, the missing nose is quasi a symbol of the Soviet Union after Russian Futurism.

“Nose [lost]” can also be in some way compared with the motto of this year’s MaerzMusik “Utopia [lost]”.

François Sarhan and William Kentridge create in twelve “telegrams” along with the Ictus Ensemble under the direction of Georges-Elie Octors a multimedia mixture of music, video and installation, which recalls erstwhile utopias of art and deals with their destruction anew.