48 KÖPFE AUS DEM MERKUROV MUSEUM

(48 HEADS FROM THE MERKUROV MUSEUM), 2008/2011

48 KÖPFE AUS DEM MERKUROV MUSEUM (48 HEADS FROM THE MERKUROV MUSEUM) is a film edited from digital photographs that shows cuttings from the death masks in the Merkurov Museum in Gyumri/Armenia. The masks that were created by the Soviet-Armenian sculptor Sergey Merkurov (1881–1952) and were cast off the heroes of the Soviet Union, amongst them Lenin, Vladimir Mayakovsky and Sergey Eisenstein, but also Felix Dzerzhinsky, head of the dreaded secret police or Andrey Zhdanov, responsible for the repressive cultural politics under Stalin.

The title of the film denominates what it shows and at the same time refers to Kurt Kren’s film 48 Heads from the Szondi-Test (1960): 48 HEADS FROM THE MERKUROV MUSEUM
is an exact remake of Kren’s original were the portrait photographs of Szondi’s patients are replaced by Merkurov’s plaster masks. The archive of faces that the film documents is a fragment of the history of the Soviet Union and an eerie physiognomy of its (dead) heroes.