Kathie Halfin

In the installation, the sound of a personal dream plays out of silver headphones. The sound of the Apollo-Soyuz transmission – the space docking of Soviet and American spaceships - plays loud out of an abstract red map. I aim to capture the impossibility of drawing a clear line between private and public. The personal dream contains the anxiety about publicly shared events. It creates an opportunity to explore fears and dreams of people and the space where their personal experiences occur. At the same time I focus on the public space where power relations and political interactions and struggles construct shared inter-subjective experiences. The instillation emphasizes fictional elements of the public event induced by staging and documentation.

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The relationship of public and private is important to me as I was born in the end of the Soviet era where the unity of a group was more important than an individual identity. Through the work, I revise critical moments of the modernist history and create linkages between past communist and contemporary post-communist conditions.