Felix Kalmenson.

A House of Skin is a video and installation work that charts the complex role mass-produced concrete high-rise apartment buildings have played in defining the landscapes of post-soviet experience both in the diaspora and the country of origin. The work problematizes the grand narratives that have accompanied both the formations and failures of the modernist architectural and social project and introduces ruptures that inscribe vernacular ways of being and telling. The work re-examines these architectures, not as totalizing spaces, but as selective frameworks within which various narratives of violence, struggle, migration, and displacement play out. Drawing together disparate fragments of liveleak and youtube footage from Russia, ‘Little Moscow’ in North York (Canada), segments from Soviet Cinema, contemporary Russian propaganda films and artifacts from Kalmenson’s family archive, the work pieces together a delirious narrative that charts the coexistence of bodies in buildings.

Born in St. Petersburg, Russia in 1987, Felix Kalmenson is a Toronto-based artist with a practice in installation, video, photography, performance and sound art. His work is concerned with the mediation of histories and contemporary narratives by political, institutional and corporate bodies and how innovations in the field of communication serve to redefine publicness, sovereignty and power. Felix is a member of ADL [Association for Decentering Landscapes] with Rouzbeh Akhbari and Ash Moniz.

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Special thanks to Windsor Feminist Theatre and the Ontario Arts Council for their generous support of this exhibition.