The World Premiere of “Stanislava Pinchuk: The Theatre of War”

9 Feb 2024

The world premiere of a new video work from Ukrainian-Australian artist Stanislava Pinchuk will open at Melbourne’s ACMI – Australia’s national museum of screen culture.

Titled The Theatre of War, Pinchuk’s three-channel video work explores Homer’s ancient war poem The Iliad, and its ongoing relevance to contemporary conflicts.

Pinchuk sets her work nine years into the invasion of Ukraine by Russia. She weaves together three charged performances which draw on the oral and folk traditions from which The Iliad evolved. Just as the poem contains many gruesome descriptions of death on the battlefield, so do these performers focus our attention on both the lifeforce and vulnerability of bodies in contemporary ‘theatres of war’.

Stanislava Pinchuk is the 2019 recipient of the Mordant Family Moving Image Commission for young Australian artists.

Stanislava Pinchuk: The Theatre of War will show in ACMI’s Gallery 3 from 19 February – 9 June 2024

Image: Video still of Stanislava Pinchuk’s ‘The Theatre of War’, 2024, three-channel video. Courtesy of the artist