KAGA (child in Komi)

I feel this part of me was being kept in the basement and now the monster-child has broken through.

SPAWNING OF KOMI KAGA is a collection of sequential 3D animated videos arranged in a circle as an installation. It presents Ksti Hu’s personal journey to the soul of her grandmother’s culture. The video focuses on customary beliefs, songs, and myths from childhood that were always there, but were never fully acknowledged by the artist and are now revived in the memory. The artist reflects on socialisation in Russian culture and how it has made her perceive indigenous tradition as invalid and thus invisible. In the video, the artist weaves together lived knowledge and fabulation in an attempt to stand against the colonial perception she was brought up in. She sets the Komi child out on a journey that includes a spiritual meeting and a reacquaintance with ancestors. The question here is: how do we start a dialogue about what was lost and about the exhausting search we urgently need to enter into?

The sequential appearance of looped videos on the screens and the rotation of 3D figures in them are foregrounded by evocative sound. The Komi funeral song shown here mirrors life’s cyclical dance and refers to Komi’s major cultural belief in the absence of death. The installation intends to translate suffering, a sense of entrapment, and an urgent need to escape. The hexagonal tableau of screens transmits the tension and emotional devastation created by wounds of colonial torment and intimate memories of the culture shared with loved ones.

The transformation of the character becomes a metaphor for rage and a readiness for self-defence as well as the difficult situation for a young mind, crushed between opposing fields. It carries an emancipatory legacy of a grandmother, a lost national identity, and ties to ancestors, thereby crafting a bridge between the past and present of the Komi people.