AES+F, 2018

Theatre set design

Mixed Reality installation/performance and 1-channel video

Psychosis (MR or Mixed Reality installation) is based on the text of the cult British playwright Sarah Kane (1971-1999) "4:48 Psychosis", written by her in a psychiatric clinic in early 1999, shortly before her suicide.

The viewer is transported inside the surrealistic visions of Sarah Kane’s protagonist, embarking on a psychedelic journey that begins with a real hospital corridor and transitions into the virtual space.

The MR project of the AES+F installation "Psychosis" has a prehistory in the theatrical format. In June 2016, the Stanislavsky Electrotheatre premiered the play "Psychosis" – a joint project of AES+F and director Alexander Zeldovich. The video (3D animation), created by AES+F, runs parallel to the text, sometimes associatively coinciding with it, and other times surrealistically diverging from it. In their new work the artists were interested in returning to such themes of the 90s as corporeality, psychedelics and social protest, turning to the latest digital technologies of the 21st century. The poetics of the video oscillate between fairytale-esque and terrifying, filled with images of the female body, blood, black snow, psychedelic colors and cockroaches.

The music by Dmitry Kourliandski, which is used in the installation, same as in the theatre performance, is composed of fragments of the "German Requiem" by Brahms.

Sarah Kane is the representative of the generation of the in-yer-face style, who pioneered a new aesthetic truth and ways to escape from theatrical conventionality through shock and pushing the viewer out of their comfort zone. The text of the play is organized as a cacophony of voices, which are present inside the author's head – a patient of a psychiatric clinic, where she ended up due to depression. The pre-dawn time is present in the original title of the play, a time when Sarah Kane’s protagonist either kills herself, or at last, synchronizes with herself. A hunger for love and intolerance to her own talent become the cause of self-destruction, which in reality afflicted the author.