Poor Lisa

Video art and video installation

Poor Lisa

Myroslav Kulchytskiy was born in Uzhhorod in 1970.
Artist, curator, iconic figure of Ukrainian media art.
The first curator of the Museum of Odesa Modern Art. Participant of numerous exhibitions in iconic locations of Europe. Myroslav himself characterized his artistic method as a public experiment: a kind of shared practice with the viewer, a cure for the blurred vision.

In Kulchytskiy’s video “Poor Liza”, fragments of two films are “superposed”. The first fragment is a scene from the legendary film “Cleopatra” with Elizabeth Taylor in the lead role. The second is the same scene, but from the television version of Elizabeth Taylor’s biography “The True Story of Liz Taylor”, where the famous actress is played by Sherilyn Fenn.

The video begins with dramatic music and the appearance of two almost identical silhouettes of a man dressed in a Roman toga. They have their backs turned to us and are slowly walking one after the other. The front silhouette is a little lighter, the figure following it is darker. They both slowly approach the woman’s bed under the canopy. The first seems a little higher, apparently, he has already climbed a step in front of the bed. It could be Julius Caesar visiting his beloved. The contours of the woman are blurred. This creates an element of mystical uncertainty in what is happening. The closer the silhouettes get to the bed, the vaguer becomes the interior of the bedroom, every step is accompanied by increasingly dramatic music. The slow movements of the man, the incomplete coincidence of silhouettes and interior details create a tension of incomprehension of the situation for the viewer.

Dramatic music, slow movements of mysterious silhouettes, superimposition of the two fragments allow the artist to transform a love scene into a fragment from a horror film. The identified discrepancies in the details and incomprehension of the situation are used by the author as an argument in debunking the myth of the cinema as a factory of dreams and transforming the film icon Elizabeth into an ordinary woman Lisa with her joy and pain.

In his work, Kulchytskiy emphasizes the conventional perception of what is shown to us in the cinema and invites us to think about how strongly the context, details and presentation of information affect us and how often we, without noticing it, become objects and victims of media manipulation and art.