Video Art | Lisa Minaeva

‘Blossom of silence’ is a project born from the artist’s desire to explore the human inner world without detaching oneself from reality. The tool for this exploration is a silence; primitive video equipment helps to refrain from a familiar concept of aestheticization of an image in modern media, thus being an instrument of holding on to reality.

This project consists of a series of silent video portraits. Half a century after Andy Warhol created his ‘Screen Tests’, it is a partial attempt to rethink his legacy in a modern world, familiar with Yoko Ono’s happenings, Marina Abramović’s performances and other artistic statements exploring interaction between an artist and their audience.

Blossom of Silence

This time a video portrait is not created to perpetuate the external, but to explore the internal. The task is to find out how the silence and the lack of dialogues can affect a person’s image, show their mood and their nature. The participants of this silent dialogue are the artist’s eyes, a character’s eyes, and a video recorder. A minimalistic execution allows the characters to – just by immersing themselves in silence – be themselves without really doing anything specific. Each character decides how deeply the artist along with her audience is allowed to go into their inner self.

Since starting the project in 2012, Lisa Minaeva filmed over a hundred of video portraits. The participants are the people of different kinds of occupations – musicians, actors, artists, poets, actors (Shirley Manson, Tom Meighan, SoKo, Peter Doherty, Sue Denim, Geraldine Beigbeder, Patrick Duff, Goran Bregovic, Flora Fischbach, Hayden Kays,

and others).