Twelve Ten Gallery is pleased to present “Terror Element”, a video installation by Anna Engelhardt and Mark Cinkevich. The exhibition follows a fictional investigator who attempts to reconstruct an actual case: the 1999 apartment bombings in Russia. These incidents were a pivotal moment in Russia’s recent expansionist policies, and many believe the bombings were orchestrated by Russian state security services to justify a second invasion of Chechnya and to catalyse Vladimir Putin’s rise to power.

Engelhardt and Cinkevich, Russian and Belarusian expatriates respectively, hold faint memories of the televised trials from childhood. For this work, they blend archival footage with contemporary digital animation techniques, reflecting the lasting effect the past has on our present. Fact and fiction merge together, paralleling the conflicting and contradictory media and state reports used to justify the invasion.

“Terror Element” focuses particularly on the role of forensic science, looking at how evidence can be manipulated and distorted. Drawn into grainy television footage from the past, their fictional investigator tries to understand how crime labs became tools in this powerplay. Slowly, her laboratory begins to resemble the televised one. As she struggles to reconcile her role as a forensic scientist with her personal memories of the bombings, the boundary between evidence, interpretation, and fabrication starts to dissolve. Soon, doubt seeps in: would her own forensic methods stand up to scrutiny?

The installation stages part of the onscreen crime lab, featuring a CRT monitor displaying the film and an HD camcorder framing a live feed of the set. This recursive mise-en-scène invites viewers to examine the act of witnessing and how it affects the construction of truth.

Anna Engelhardt is an alias of a video artist and writer. Her investigative practice follows the traces of material violence, focusing on what could be seen as the ‘ghost’ of information. The toxic information environments she deals with stem from structures of extraction, occupation and dispossession. Her work has been shown at transmediale, Berlin; ICA, London; Kyiv Biennial; Ars Electronica; Biennial TEA Tenerife; National Gallery of Art, Lithuania, BFI London Film Festival; B3 Biennial of the Moving Image, Frankfurt; The Henie Onstad Triennial for Photography and New Media, Oslo.

Mark Cinkevich is a Belarus-born interdisciplinary researcher and artist. In his practice, he is interested in critical, speculative and experimental aspects of art that operate at the intersection of fact and fiction. His work focuses on the post-Soviet infrastructural and social landscape, through which he explores in particular the concepts of nuclear colonialism, infrastructural colonialism, extractivism and monstrosity. His works have been shown at transmediale in Berlin, steirischer herbst in Graz, the BFI London Film Festival, the National Gallery of Art in Vilnius, Ars Electronica in Linz, and the Aksioma Institute for Contemporary Art in Ljubljana, among others.

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Tags: Anna Engelhard, Chicago, Edgewater, Mark Cinkevich, Terror Element, Twelve Ten Gallery