Hello 82 / privet 82
Lexi Fleurs x Nikol Goldman
shown at Lothringer 13, Munich as part of “ Antifascism:Now!”
Hello-82 / Privet-82 is built from evidence. Over several months, Fleurs and Goldman conducted a systematic review of open-source documentation of russian war crimes in Ukraine, working exclusively with material captured and circulated by the perpetrators themselves: FPV drone feeds published by russian operators. From a corpus of approximately one hundred videos — the majority documenting strikes on civilians in frontline areas, disproportionately elderly residents who had remained in their homes — a narrow selection was isolated for the installation.
Positioned in the vantage point of a russian drone operator, the viewer inhabits the blurred threshold between observer and perpetrator, confronting the ethical tension of complicity through distance.The installation refuses the consolation of the witness position. What it stages instead is the threshold at which observation and inaction becomes participation — the specific ethical structure of remote violence, in which distance is not merely a technical condition but the mechanism by which killing is made bearable to the person performing it, and legible as content to everyone downstream.
An audio composition of a flying FPV drone runs against the visual material, the sound that any victims of FPV attacks hear. The sound of an an FPV drone has gained the nickname “the sound of death”.
The work sits deliberately between two registers that rarely share a room: OSINT investigation, with its evidentiary discipline and chain-of-custody logic, and installation practice, with its capacity to make a viewer's own position uncomfortable.
The work poses a single question: what are you doing to prevent this? Placing the viewer at the controls is not a provocation for its own sake but an argument. The war continues while Europe watches from a comfortable distance, and the installation proposes that this distance is not innocence. To occupy the operator's seat is to be shown that inaction has a position within the crime — that comfort maintained alongside knowledge is itself a form of participation, and that the chair the viewer is sitting in was never neutral.
Art in America : Ara H. Merjian, “The Original Antifa Fought the Nazis. A New Art Exhibition Asks What’s Next”
Monopol DE: Ingo Arend, "Ein antifaschistischer Weckruf"
e-flux :ANTIFASCISM: NOW.
DARE Magazin :“Den neuen Faschismen die Stirn bieten”
Artline: “Antifascism: Now — Zeit zum Handeln”
Athinorama : “Munich shouts ‘Antifascism: Now’ and Athens takes over
artmagazine.cc:“Antifascism:Now.Ein künstlerischer Kult für die Demokratie”
© Christian Kain & Lothringer 13 Halle
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For enquiries regarding this project — exhibition and screening requests, press, or reproduction of images — please contact: lexifleurs@gmail.com.
Content note:
This is a short excerpt from Hello-82 / Privet-82. The work incorporates unaltered documentary footage of attacks on civilians, including fatal strikes. The material is graphic. Viewer discretion is advised.