Opening: 24 Hour Swan Lake by Sanie Irsay

24 Hour Swan Lake by Sanie Irsay
Eye Becomes Water

Opening: Monday, February 24, 2025 - 6 PM
Public event with Radio Svitlo: Thursday, February 27, 2025 - 6 PM
Live readings, sound performance, and zine sale

Location: Het Paviljoen, Louis Pasteurlaan 2, 9000 Ghent
More information: https://www.instagram.com/hetpaviljoen/

Monday, the 24th of February 2025 marks three years of Russia’s grand scale invasion of Ukraine. Sanie Irsay takes this date as the departure point for 24 Hour Swan Lake, a reinterpretation of a recording of Bolshoy Theater’s 1984 rendition of Swan Lake, here slowed down to a pace of twenty-four hours.

In the final decade of the USSR, looped recordings of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake were broadcast across all television channels during moments of political turmoil: the deaths of Soviet leaders and the 1991 coup attempt against Gorbachev. Over time, the ballet became a symbol of political instability and state control. In 2022, TV Rain, Russia's last independent TV station, aired Swan Lake once again in their final broadcast before being shut down for opposing the invasion of Ukraine.

Irsay’s 24 Hour Swan Lake slows down the ballet to roughly one frame per second, creating a sense of suspension suggestive of a perpetual crisis. Through this slowness, the historical weight of the ballet is recontextualised, echoing with contemporary issues. From the war in Ukraine to the genocide in Palestine, Irsay’s work speaks to the persistent, silent violence in which we are living – the slow emergencies. The duration of the work refers to Douglas Gordon’s seminal work 24 Hour Psycho (1993), in which extreme slow motion dissolves the narrative of Hitchcock’s classic film, interfering with our perception of time. By sharpening our attention to slowness, 24 Hour Swan Lake contrasts the sensational, high-speed mediascapes that surround us today. The work invites reflection on the “not yet," on emergence rather than emergency.

Sanie Irsay (b. 1996) lives and works between New York, NY and Amsterdam, NL. Irsay draws on her heritage as an Uzbekistan-born Crimean Tatar, the indigenous people of Russian-occupied Crimea. Working across the mediums of sculpture, drawing, print, and film, she is primarily interested in social and spatial structures, zones of inclusion, exclusion, and exception.

24 Hour Swan Lake is part of Eye becomes water, an exhibition and public programme curated by Daphné Charitos, Natalija Gucheva, Abel Hartooni, Yasemin Köker, Temitayo Olalekan, and Jean Watt. Drawing from the history of Het Paviljoen, which served as the waiting room for pregnant patients at the historic Bijloke hospital, Eye becomes water explores waiting not as a passive or neutral act, but as one that engages multiple temporalities, bodily experiences, and power dynamics.

Graphic design by Hana Kiani.

This project is supported by KASK & Conservatorium and Curatorial Studies.