The Earth Trembles from Shockwaves, and the Waves Strike Their Bodies, 2026

six-channel video, stereo sound
Camera: Oleksandra Lianna
Sound: Leon Seidel

The video installation The Earth Trembles from Shockwaves, and the Waves Strike Their Bodies, presented at the MUHi 2026 exhibition, emerged from footage shot during the production of the short film Black Waters, in which the artist approaches the Black Sea environment as a damaged ecosystem and a space of the unconscious. The work grew out of a formal question: how can accumulated material be presented while expanding the boundaries of the medium?

Cinema as a medium usually implies narrative and the gradual unfolding of a story through a sequence of shots, with a beginning, climax, and ending. By contrast, The Earth Trembles from Shockwaves, and the Waves Strike Their Bodies resembles sculpture or painting, where bodies and events exist not sequentially, but simultaneously and together. Their continuity is constructed instead through the materiality of the image.

Across six screens, static shots of the Black Sea coast, close in quality to photographs, merge into a continuous moving-image tableau. Here, the city, the environment, people, animals, and plants form a single shared body, each part preserving traces of warfare in its own way. The barely perceptible movements within the static videos become visible only in the context of the multichannel whole — just as the destruction of infrastructure and the environment, as well as the traumatic experiences of human and non-human beings, constitute distinct manifestations of the all-pervasive violence of war.

Elza Gubanova is an artist and curator from Odesa, Ukraine. She currently lives and works in Leipzig, where she is studying in the Expanded Cinema class at the Leipzig Academy of Fine Arts. Her practice primarily engages with photography, video, and installation. In her work, Gubanova explores the intersections between the body and the environment. Over the past two years, her practice has focused on ecological devastation, slow violence, and the ways these processes accumulate within both human and more-than-human bodies. Since 2021, she has been collaborating with German artist Leon Seidel on research-based, site-specific projects situated at the intersection of artistic and curatorial practice. She is also a co-founder of the artist collective Óstov and the exhibition space Forum Neun. Elza Gubanova’s works have been presented at the Bundeskunsthalle Bonn, Kunsthaus Hamburg, the Odesa Museum of Modern Art (MSMO), the House of Sound in Lviv, and other international institutions.

Photographer: Anton Sorochak