Ice Floes of Franz Joseph land

Assistant Costume designer

Catherine Sullivan (2003) Whitney Museum permanent collection, New York ;Prague Biennial, Prague; Kunsthalle Zürich, Switzerland; Gió Marconi, Milan   Video Link and more information  http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/sullivan/#

This video installation takes as its point of departure the Chechen rebel takeover of the Russian musical Nord-Ost in 2002, in which the actors and audience were held hostage for several days in a Moscow theater. These scenes derive from Sullivan's interpretation of Veniamin Kaverin's Two Captains (1942), a classic Russian love and adventure novel about polar aviation and Russian expansion in the Arctic Sea upon which the musical Nord-Ost was based. Sullivan re-creates the ten sections of the novel through a series of forty vignettes. Each actor learned roughly fifty pantomime-like actions that recall the traditions of musical theater and was then filmed performing them in different combinations. Primarily shot at the Polish American Army Veterans Association in Chicago, the footage is presented on five screens. One larger screen shows foundational gestures of the novel, while the four smaller screens depict spin-offs in other locations, suggesting a narrative development. Using the actors' bodies as vehicles of expression and the theater as a site for emotional transcendence, Sullivan situates the Moscow siege within the context of an artistic production, resulting in a conflation of the real and the imaginary.