Valentina Dobrovas Life

Valentina Dobrova eleven years old when she run away from home. Photo: family Romanovski, ca 1929.
Valentina Dobrova eleven years old when she run away from home. Photo: family Romanovski, ca 1929.
Valentina Dobrovas Life is a story about a story. The narrative consists of things that you may tell and things that are not suitable to tell or even remember. The Life Story of Valentina covers the geography of the former USSR and two historical tragedies: First the mass starvation and hunger catastrophe in Ukraine in 1932-1933 and then the system of labor camps that goes under the label GULAG and foremost the odyssey of Valentina from the day she escapes her father and Steph mother in Dnepropetrovsk Ukraine in 1932 11 years old to the day she reunites with her family thirty years after. Families hide their secrets in a hole in the garden or lock them into real or virtual safety vaults. The next generation and the generations after carrying a secret non revealed grows up with a feeling that somebody one day has to Speak Out. That somebody has to tell the truth. The Life of Valentina Dobrova is a documentary project and a filmatic collaboration between Denis Romanovski, the grandchild of Valentina Dobrova, and Nils Claesson – One person from the inside of a family and one from the outside. This is an exposition using the gallery space to create a Gestalt of photographic fragments and a forest of family films– The family album of Valentina that she one day tore apart into tiny pieces in an attack of anger: all photos except one. A portrait of French movie star Jean-Paul Belmondo. Translation from Russian: Kajsa Öberg Lindsten. Vladimir Romanovski, the father of Denis has contributed to the project with films, photos, videos, and archive research. Far. Vladimir Romanovski was born in GULAG and belongs to the first generation of children born in GULAG that was allowed to live. He was born in 1941.

Nils Claesson

Claesson received his PhD in fine arts from the Film and Media Department at Stockholm University of the Arts with the dissertation The Ghost Machine: Seven changes and transitions – animation processes in animated film. Claesson joined the newspaper ETC 1979–1984, where he was a co-owner for a while. He had acting roles in two films in the 1980s, among other things in Stig Larsson's film Ängel but he has mainly directed, written manuscript and worked with animated films and radio documentaries. He has been working with digital media since the mid-1990s, and has played a central role in the development of Swedish digital art through his work for the artistic creative space for art and computing (CRAC), where he was chairman from 2002 to 2005.[9][10] In connection with this, he established a broad international network, and organized international exhibitions such as "Money, a comment on the new economy”,as well as seminars and exchange projects with other media labs in Europe. He also led the network for media labs in Norway, Pnek 2001–2002, and was one of the artists behind the Association for Temporary Art [a: t] a platform for art online (1997–2007). He has also been active in the artist-driven galleries Tegen2 and ID:I gallery.[15] Claesson has exhibited extensively in Sweden and Europe. The book The Blueberry Machine, published 2009, is about his father Stig Claesson.

Denis Romanovski

Denis Romanovski (1970 Minsk, Belarus) is an artist and organizer based in Göteborg, Sweden. As an organiser, he has been running and producing numerous international and local art events, festivals, and exchange projects such as: Net Art Meetings (Minsk, 2001), RAM7 (2005), international performance festival Navinki (Minsk, 1999-2008), PALS – Performance Art Links festival in Stockholm. And STATUS The Role of the Artist in the Changing of Society. His artistic practice ranges from performance art to interactive and technology based art, artistic investigations and similar tactics. His performances often focus on dynamic relations between the members of the audience, creating situations for individual expressions and experience of collective awareness. Denis Romanovski is actively involved in several artist run organizations: Gallery54, Konstepidemin, Fylkingen. http://romanovski.se