Dreamachinery

Ruthia Jenrbekova

The exposition presents individual outcomes of the collective PEEK project “The Magic Closet and the Dream Machine: Post-Soviet Queerness, Archiving, and the Art of Resistance” (AR 567), which was implemented in 2020—2024 by four artists/researchers: Katharina Wiedlack, Masha Godovannaya, Iain Zabolotny and Ruthia Jenrbekova. The overall conceptual frame, based on the well-known artefact called “Dreamachine”, has been developed by this collective, however, the exposition at hand present a particular approach and outcomes by its author, a PhD-in-Practice candidate Ruthia Jenrbekova. Our experimental art-research project was a study of queer lives in a number of post-soviet cities. One of the project’s ambition was developing and testing an experimental artistic methodology, which in my version is called “Dreamachinery”. Trying to connect it to a particular artistic tradition that I labeled as “Queer Light & Magic”, I present here a few outcomes of my personal interactions with the participants of a series of workshops that I conducted in the cities of Almaty, Tbilisi, Yerevan, Berlin and Vienna.

DISCLAIMER

The field work was done as part of the PEEK project The Magic Closet and the Dream Machine: Post-Soviet Queerness, Archiving, and the Art of Resistance (AR 567) was implemented in 2020—2024 by four artists/researchers: Katharina Wiedlack, Masha Godovannaya, Iain Zabolotny and Ruthia Jenrbekova (yours truly). The overall conceptual frame and the methodology based on Dreamachine Workshops were developed by this collective. At the same time, in their practice all four researchers implemented slightly different approaches and arrived at different results. What is presented here is an overview of a particular approach and outcomes by the author of the publication at hand, a PhD-in-Practice candidate Ruthia Jenrbekova.

DREAMACHINERY:

QUEER LIGHT & MAGIC IN POST-SOVIET SPACES

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