Maria Zaikina
Places in the In-Between

Media Author(s)

Maria Zaikina

Research Project

‘Places in the In-Between’
An Exhibition

Maria Zaikina is a visual artist and production designer working with video and installation. Her artistic practice often reflects on the themes of utopia, transit, and poetic transformations of space. She graduated from the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography (VGIK) in Moscow, where she studied in the Art Department, and completed her Master’s degree at the École nationale supérieure d’arts de Paris-Cergy (ENSAPC). Currently, she is based in Munich, where she studies in the Media Art class led by Professor Julian Rosefeldt at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich.

Her work Arrival of the Train was filmed in Iceland and reimagines the famous Lumière Brothers’ film as a contemplative sound and video installation.

Arrival of Train | video 13’44”, 2018 (View Video)

This sound installation was created in the winter of 2018 in the small Icelandic town of Blönduós. A place where time seems to stand still, and sounds dissolve into silence.

The railway is a symbol of progress, revolution and perpetual movement. But in Iceland, there has never been a railway, and perhaps there never will be.

For this work, Maria Zaikina composed the sound of a train, inspired by the first electric locomotive, the Lumière train, which marked the beginning of a new era of cinema. The sound resonated from the oldest building in town, intertwining fiction and reality.

People listened, trying to understand what was happening. But perhaps the train was only an idea, a dream lingering at the boundary between past and future.

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Maria Zaikina Places in the In-Between

Maria Zaikina
Places in the In-Between