2019-2021
Ryan Ferko (Canada) is an artist working predominantly in film and video. Across cinema and gallery, his films and installations are concerned with landscapes as unstable sources of narration. Ferko turns to myth, story-telling, amateur ‘experts’, and distorted memories as a way to find narrative’s alternative official histories. His artwork emerges as an extension of his research and critical writing, exploring how history is narrated by the competing forces of urban development and architectural heritage. Recent screenings and exhibitions have been held at Tabakalera Centre for International Culture, Sharjah Art Foundation, TIFF (Wavelengths), NYFF (Projections), 24th Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival, Viennale, Edinburgh IFF, Punto De Vista International Documentary Festival, Crossroads, and three previous editions of Media City Film Festival. He lives and works in Toronto, Ontario.
Ryan Ferko’s new film is a kind of anti-travelogue of Belgrade. More specifically, it’s about the way that the remnants of the Balkans War can only be seen as absence—empty buildings and offices, spaces where key events happened but there is no evidence to be found. If a work like Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah takes this key historiographic idea and presents it as straightforward tragedy, Ferko displays it not as farce but as a tragicomic aspect of late 20th / early 21st century postmodernity. In one sequence, Ferko erects a “TV monument” to the very problem of monumentality, shooting video of a makeshift curbside shrine, and then projecting it on a large monitor on a pedestal in front of a building, where a classical monument would stand.
Two moments, though, best encapsulate Ferko’s poetic consideration of the crisis of cultural memory. In one scene, we see a mother and child at a memorial marker for those killed in the war. The kid asks why they can’t go see the actual ruins of one of the bombed-out buildings. “It’s not safe,” she tells him. “It could collapse. Just cross yourself and say ‘rest in peace,'” and he dutifully complies. And, in an earlier discussion, a young man explains how, during the war, cigarettes were very hard to come by, but weed and LSD were plentiful. So, during a particular deadly raid, he happened to be tripping his ass off. The sound of bombs, the lights, and vibrations all felt to him like a “strange vision of seeing things.” But Ferko seems to suggest that in both cases, there is a misconception that is dictated by the desire to see Serbia as something very different than what it actually is. –Michael Sicinski, MUBI
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