Russian multimedia artist Ilia Rogatchevski takes his cues from insurrectionist modernist movements like Fluxus, Dada and the 1960’s avant-garde social revolutionaries known as Situationist International. His prolific output varies from paintings and collage to installations and AV work. Appropriation and subversion play key roles in his practice, where phrases, sounds and images are culled from popular culture sources, hijacked, détourned, then disseminated back into the public sphere. The refracted transformation of the original message encourages the audience to construct and see new meanings from within the uncanny narratives.
At Splice, Rogatchevski presents Souvenir, a piece about memory, texture and documentation. The soundtrack is composed from sampled charity shop LPs and AM radio sweeps. Augmenting and reworking certain aspects of these unwanted cultural documents reanimates their content, whilst careful juxtaposition reimagines their hidden potential. The live audio is coupled with moving images sourced from the artist’s own archive, shot many years ago, but never used. These images now provoke questions of truth and texture… what is more potent: the memory or a digital recording of it?