Orlow, Uriel
Uriel Orlow’s contemplative films focus on traumatic historical events that have been overlooked or forgotten. Fusing documentary filmmaking with unexpected fictional interventions, his works are meditations on the ways in which history and memory are constructed in the present.
The subjects of Remnants of the Future and Plans for the Past are two towns near the border of Europe and Asia that share the same name – Mush. The town in Remnants of the Future is the site of a large-scale housing project initiated in 1988 after a major earthquake in Northern Armenia left thousands of people without homes, left abandoned and incomplete after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Plans for the Past focuses on the town that gave the ambitious housing project its name. Now a part of modern-day Turkey, this town was the site of horrific massacres during the Armenian genocide of 1915. Nearly 100 years after the event, Orlow’s camera shows us that the town’s domestic and public buildings still bear the scars.
- Artwork Details: running time: 17 minutes 20seconds
- Edition: 2 in edition of 3 + 2AP
- Material description: HD video (cinemascope) with sound, aspect ratio 2.55:1
- Credit line: Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre, London © the artist.
- Theme: Conflict
- Medium: Film and Audio Visual
- Accession number: ACC15/2014