GOGBOT Shorts Blok 4

Helenés (Apparition of Freedom) brings together two forms of political propaganda separated by time and ideology. In 1998, Christoph Draeger discovered and secretly removed a 16mm film from an abandoned civil-protection training camp in Hungary. The footage documents a Cold War military exercise preparing civilians for the imagined devastation of nuclear war: gas masks, ruined landscapes, emergency procedures, and images of catastrophe.

In 2005, Draeger returned to this apocalyptic material and paired it with excerpts from George W. Bush’s second inaugural address, a speech organized around the promise of spreading freedom and democracy. The collision produces an uneasy symmetry between the ideological languages of East and West: images designed to prepare a population for annihilation become accompanied by the rhetoric of liberation. Rather than simply opposing propaganda with reality, Helenés reveals how fear, freedom, catastrophe, and political authority can be constructed through images and language.

Christoph Draeger is a Swiss artist and filmmaker whose work frequently engages with catastrophe, violence, disaster, and their representation through mass media and found images.

Hungary / USA 2005 | 17'50"

Putin’s Ashes transforms political rage into a ritual of symbolic destruction. The film documents a performance initiated by Pussy Riot in August 2022, in which twelve women—mostly Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Russian—gather in the desert to burn a monumental portrait of Vladimir Putin. Wearing balaclavas, they perform rituals around the burning image, driving knives into the earth and casting spells intended to expel Putin from power.

The work turns the destruction of a political image into an act of collective fantasy and resistance. Putin’s carefully cultivated mythology of masculine strength and invulnerability is replaced by an image of a body that can be burned, reduced to ashes, and symbolically defeated. The ashes themselves were collected and preserved by Nadya Tolokonnikova, later becoming physical objects within an installation. Through music, ritual, feminist imagery, and magical thinking, Putin’s Ashes proposes imagination not as an escape from political reality, but as a weapon against the apparent permanence of authoritarian power.

Pussy Riot is a Russian feminist protest-art collective founded in Moscow. Putin’s Ashes was directed, edited, styled, and scored by founding member Nadya Tolokonnikova, whose practice combines performance, music, visual art, and political activism in opposition to authoritarianism and patriarchal power.

2023 | 3'04"