Tsaplya Olga Egorova, Dmitry Vilensky and Nikolay Oleynikov
in collaboration with Vera Shchelkina (choreography) and Maria Markina (music)
Fell Down – Get Up
Opening: Friday September 11, 2026 7-11 p.m.
Exhibition: September 11 – October 18, 2026
Organized by: Gergely László
Open by appointment:
Artist talk: September 13, 2026, 14-7 p.m., What to do?
Chto Delat in conversation with Joanna Warzsa (Stadtkuratorin Hamburg) in English.
Fell Down – Get Up is a multimedia installation bringing together 3 video works, lecture performance, collages, mosaics into a single narrative environment. Developed collectively by Chto Delat International, the project emerges from collaboration with artists, activists, musicians, and migrants from Russia living in Germany, united by shared experiences of displacement, war, political repression, and the collapse of emancipatory hopes.
The installation explores the emotional and political terrain of manipulation and resistance, betrayal and solidarity, hope and despair. While rooted in the experience of migration, it reflects more broadly on the recurring failures of revolutionary movements, the persistence of social and ecological injustice, and the possibility of collective action in an increasingly fragmented world. Drawing on a marginal post-socialist perspective, the project engages both German history and the contemporary global political crisis.
Its conceptual point of departure is Werner Tübke’s monumental Panorama of the Peasants’ War and Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Niklashausen Journey. Rather than treating these works as historical monuments, Fell Down – Get Up reactivates their emancipatory potential, asking how collective memory, imagination, and solidarity might survive political defeat.
At the center of the installation is the feature-length film Songs of Hope and Despair, shot in 2025 in the former mining town of Hettstedt. Blending road movie, ritual performance, and political fairy tale, the film follows a procession of symbolic characters inspired by fragments of Tübke’s painting—including the Bundschuh, the Fish, the Rainbow, the Dead Drummer, and Muse-Leaving-Germany—as they journey through a landscape manipulated by a trickster-magician. Accompanied by the haunting voices of Wilder ChorYander, they search for justice while confronting invisible forces that shape their fate. Their vulnerability, persistence, and mutual care become expressions of hope and solidarity.
None of the participants are professional actors. Each performer developed their character through collective improvisation and personal experience, giving the work an unusual combination of authenticity, vulnerability, humor, and political imagination.
The installation also includes two additional moving-image works: Some Blind Encounters on the Way to Niklashausen, which extends the narrative of the main film, and philosopher Oxana Timofeeva’s lecture performance What if an Apocalypse Is Now the New Normal?, reflecting on the normalization of permanent catastrophe.
The visual environment is completed by 21 Episodes: A Brief Guide to the Film Songs of Hope and Despair—a series of twenty-one collages and a board-game table that functions simultaneously as map, archive, and narrative device. Combining fragments of Tübke’s panorama, film stills, historical images, and contemporary visual material, the collages weave together history, mythology, and present-day political realities.
Together, the films, lecture performance, collages, and participatory elements create an immersive environment that invites viewers to navigate between different historical temporalities and political imaginaries. Rather than offering a linear narrative, Fell Down – Get Up opens a space for collective reflection on defeat, resilience, and the uncertain possibility of beginning again.
A production of this film and installation was developed within the framework of Planetarische Bauern (Planetary Peasants) exhibition at Kunstmuseum Moritzburg Halle (Saale) 23 May – 14 September 2025. With additional support from: Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg (exhibition “Utopia. The Right to Hope”) and Institute of Global Reconstitution (Berlin).
About the artists:
Chto Delat (What Is to Be Done?) is an international collective of artists, philosophers, writers, and activists founded in St. Petersburg in 2003. Working across film, installation, theater, publications, and education, the collective combines contemporary art with political theory and collective research. Its work has been presented at major museums and biennials worldwide, including documenta 12 (Journal of Journals), the Gwangju Biennale, and numerous international exhibitions, and is held in public and private collections ( The Museum of Modern Art , New York; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; Museum Reina Sophia, Madrid; Le Centre Pompidou, Paris; MAXXI — Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI; MUDAM, Luxemburg and others). Following the forced exile of most members after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the collective continues its work as Chto Delat International from Hamburg and Berlin.
With friendly support of:
