Vagrich Bakhchanyan was the last futurist, avant-gardeist, formalist, nonconformist, social artist; he was one of the founders of the Soviet conceptualism, “a living fossil,” a laureate of international cartoon competitions, an expert on the Western avant-garde, the creator SOSrealism method... And he’s the author of the aphorism: “We are born to make Kafka true.” He was “the mockingbird of the Soviet Union,” who became a favorite author of comic strips at the sixteenth page of Literaturnaya Gazeta – one of the few strongholds of dissent in the 1970s.
Vagrich was born in Kharkiv, lived in Moscow and spent the last 35 years of his life in New York, becoming “one of the three heroes of America – along with Joseph Brodsky and Sergei Dovlatov.” Bakhchanyan left behind thousands of drawings, collages, tens of notebooks, and hundreds of book covers and magazine front pages, more than a hundred volumes of “telephone illustrations.” The absurd, surreal world of the artist fills the film’s screen space – pictures, animation, performances, theater. This world hides his mystery and the mystery of the “Black Square.”
The documentary and the artist’s life has been commented to the audience by Hennadii Kofman – producer, director of “MaGiKa Film,” co-founder and program director of the International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival – Docudays UA. The project “Cinema/Context” shows modern Ukrainian documentaries and conversations with their producers. It is a joint project of Docudays UA and Kyiv Mohyla Business School. The project’s purpose is to explore the topical issues using films and study the nature of film creation, promotion, sale, and production in Ukrainian realities.
Incidentally, the film Vagrich and the Black Square was recently shown in Kharkiv, at the exhibition “Vagrich Bakhchanyan – a literary artist.”
