Director: Lilia Li-Mi-Yan

Film: When the hawk comes

Bio: A short video by artists Lilia Li-Mi-Yan (Yerevan) and Katherina Sadovsky (Moscow) is a sad, poetic metaphor for what is happening in the world today. The plot and melody of an Armenian lullaby are taken as a starting point, where a mother tries to calm her son by offering to make a symbolic choice of a destiny bird. The boy does not choose peaceful birds, nightingale, or magpie. His predictable choice is a warlike hawk.

The horrors of war are resolutely put out of the brackets of this world without men. It is a gynaeceum, majestic, beautiful and frightening. Nineteen women of different ages wander in a string through the endless desert, re-mastering or forever saying goodbye to the space reminiscent of the fields of past battles. At times, the space collapses into a dark cave, a cramped stage area or a place for prayer. At these moments, the movement of women looks like a mysterious ritual. It seems necessary and meaningful.

Under the alarmingly changing sound of the lullaby, the stones hang in the air, the predatory hawk turns into a drone and the expectation of catharsis increases. The audience, indeed, is brought close to him, and twice. At first, space explodes with a cataclysm, suggesting the fateful presence of higher forces, and later, the glow of sunset is too similar to a fatal explosion of human origin. And it becomes clear that in this story, there is not only a happy end, but there is no end – it is looped, as it should be at video screenings. Here, this usual technique takes on a new meaning and significance. The story begins from the beginning, and the viewer returns to the pile of female bodies that wake up from sleep or get up after death. Folklore motifs of a lullaby are filled with actual meanings, meditativeness – hidden despair.

Lilia Li-Mi-Yan (B. 1971) and Katherina Sadovsky (B. 1985) are a duo of Russian artists, currently based in Yerevan (Armenia). They studied photography at the Rodchenko Art School, Moscow. They have been working together since 2016. Their versatile approach to art practice covers such art media as photography, painting, sculpture, photo books, installation, video, sound, intervention into public and natural spaces, social activism on collection of plastic waste in Moscow.