Masha Godovannaya

Visual artist, queer-feminist researcher, curator, and educator.

Born in Moscow in 1976, Masha studied music, literature, and book publishing before leaving for the United States in 1995. In New York Masha joined the Mecca of experimental cinema, the Anthology Film Archives. During several years, she devoted herself to programming film series in various cultural institutions and festivals, and in the meantime worked on her own movies. After living in New York for seven years, she returned to St. Petersburg, Russia, in 2003 where she continued her artistic career and taught film/video classes at the Department of Liberal Arts and Science (Smolny College) of St. Petersburg State University. In 2016, she entered Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, Austria, as a PhD in Practice candidate.

Approaching art production as artistic research and collective action, Masha’s artistic and scholarly practices draw on combinations of approaches and spheres such as moving image theory, experimental cinema and DIY video tradition, social science, queer theory, decolonial methodologies, and contemporary art.

Masha holds MFA degree in Film/Video from Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Bard College, New York, and MA in Sociology from European University in St. Petersburg, Russia.

Masha’s films and visual works have been shown at many festivals, screenings and art venues (such as Rotterdam Film Festival, the Tate Modern, Oberhausen International Film Festival, London Film Festival, Manifesta-10, 7th Liverpool Biennial, Center Georges Pompidou, etc.)

At the end of 2015 together with a group of artists, activists, and social researchers from St. Petersburg, Russia, she co-founded a queer-feminist affinity art group “Unwanted Organisation” (https://faagunwanted.wordpress.com/)

https://mashagodovannaya.wordpress.com/

📍 Russia
→ Mexico

It’s A Queer Time (2025)

27:30, HD video, color, sound

Inspired by a poem of 1915 “It’s A Queer Time” by Robert Graves and bewitched by the poetic works of St. Petersburg-based contemporary poet Stanislava Mogileva, this visual essay investigates the complexity of the personal experiences of two people during wartime: an 86-year-old man, the filmmaker’s father, who as a 20-year-old Soviet Army conscript, participated in the suppression of the Hungarian liberation movement in the fall of 1956, and the filmmaker herself, the mother of a young man who was the same age as her father when the full-scale war in Ukraine began in 2022.

The father’s past experiences as a greenhorn commander, driving a tank into Budapest at night, have been evoked by the Russian-Ukrainian war. They resonated with the filmmaker’s own abysmal maternal fear of “delivering” her son to a gluttonous Moloch: a military industrial complex that feeds on violence, death, and the destruction of life.

Built as a complex audio-visual collage of heterogeneous elements – the documentation of habitual spaces, leafing through a family album, recitations of poems, rituals performed for an organ which has been removed and sonic engagement with an outdated Soviet Armed Forces Identification Card, – the film encapsulates the sense of queer time as a strange, perverted, out-of-joint temporality. This queer time marks reality as warped, fractured, and bent by repeated histories, traumatic memories, present fears, forced displacements as well as by desires for proximity, close encounters, connectedness, and sensual touch.

The film is a personal response to an imminent demand to look into the face of war and find a visual vocabulary to address contemporary conflicts with their devastating aftermath on bodies, psychics, lives, and futurity.