Natalia Ryss: Sanatorium

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The exhibition Sanatorium takes its title from the central work screened in the gallery’s inner space. Shot in 2013 at a convalescent home in Russia, the short film was born out of Natalia Ryss’s fascination with the place’s eclectic architecture. Upon entering the building, she discovered a strange world suspended between nostalgia and neglect: faded, dusty scarlet carpets, skeletons of sunshades blowing in the wind, a woman sunbathing on an abandoned roof, and piles of trash set against a mountain landscape. This is a space that looks as though it is trapped in another time, a relic of an old world that has never been uprooted. The notion of convalescing – supposedly the heart of the sanatorium – appears here devoid of substance, an empty promise that has lost its meaning.

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This sense of disintegration also comes across in the work Alexander Mosolov. Three Pieces, which is based on an early composition by the Soviet composer Alexander Mosolov, one of the prominent figures in the Russian avant-garde in the 1920s. His music, influenced by Futurism and Constructivism and characterized by mechanical rhythms and aggressive sounds, was branded in the 1930s as too formalist for the Stalinist regime. Mosolov was arrested, exiled, and forced to abandon his artistic language. Ryss couples these sounds with photographic images she captured after immigrating to Israel: a local aesthetic of neglect, into which she weaves frames from the video work Sanatorium. The encounter between Soviet and Israeli dereliction, combined with the piercing power of the music, creates a lingering sense of emergency.

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The film Coliseidoscope, shot in Rome in 2014, coincided with the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Prompted by these events, Ryss decided to leave Russia for the first time in her life. She filmed the Colosseum as an expression of an impending apocalypse, where the light reflected from it reminded her of the yellow and blue of the Ukrainian flag. The soundtrack, a recording of a drum circle she came across in Florence, imbues the film with a ritualistic air of warning or alarm.

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The sense of catastrophe and chaos culminates in the film Simple Forms, created in collaboration with the artist Max Epstein in 2023. In this work, the artists sought to express a simple and poetic idea: to combine the most basic shapes with the most rudimentary sounds. Conceived as an experimental exploration of the relationship between sound and image, the film was intended as an open-ended exercise in perception rather than a political statement. Yet, when viewed alongside the other works in the exhibition, what at first appears to be an almost formalist exercise gradually dissolves into a threatening space of beeps, knocks, gunfire, and noises that recall war games or a newly discovered threat – cluster bombs. The screen grows increasingly dark as more and more shapes are hurled onto it, until the entire work seems like a simultaneous collapse of visual and auditory order.

 

While work on the exhibition started several months before the outbreak of the second war with Iran, the sense of an impending disaster accompanied the entire process, both in reality and in the works themselves. Ryss presents a world where the notion of healing already seems impossible. The quietest moments in the exhibition are found in the simple images, the frames printed from the video works. Perhaps the return to the basic components, to shape, sound, and reflection, is the only remaining possibility for finding solace and grace. For now. 

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Maya Anner, curator